Restoration Nightmare / Back to Vista

Well I had a horrific time trying to restore my Acronis image. In turned out the Acronis True Image 8.0 rescue CD did not had the the serial ATA driver for my HP dv9000t notebook. Whoops. After finalling upgrading to True Image 10.0 home I was able to get the restore going. But after almost 2 hours and only 2% left to go, Acronis spit out got some message that said "Sectors copied was more than read" or something to that effect. I could mount the image fine on the Windows XP desktop that stored the image so apparently it's not corrupted. Perhaps HP's built-in Quickplay partitition had something to do with that (I had only backed up the Windows partition). Or perhaps it was because I wiped out the 10 gig HP Recovery Partition after creating 3 emergency restore DVDs and then combined that with C:. Little did I knew, however, those DVDs would help big time.

Anyways after hours and hours of futzing with the restore, I finally gave up and decided to go back to Vista Ultimate. I figured that eventually I would have to upgrade anyways so this would save the time I'd spend in the future. Then more road blocks. Because of the bad restore attempts there was no windows installed, and Vista Ultimate upgrade refused to continue setup. Apparently there's a loophole where you can install Vista by first not putting in the product key and then re-installing again. I thought I give it a shot but for some reason Vista kept complaining about not being able to assign a drive letter or whatever- even though I had it partition and format the drive. So then I tried installing via the Windows XP Media Center OEM CD that came with my Dell desktop, but apparently it, like Acronis 8, didn't have the SATA driver for my notebook. So finally I resorted to the HP rescue DVDs and a couple hours later I was back in business with XP Media Center installed. Then I was able to install Vista Ultimate successfully.

I was also happy to discover that now the Samsung SCX-4100 drivers for Vista were available. Although I'm still having the primary-monitor-going-blank problem- I've unplugged the 2ndary monitor from my notebook dock now as a temporary workaround. I went on the HP support site to look for some Vista drivers for the dv9000t- there's an update for the Intel Intel Wireless 3945 and a BIOS update. Unfortunately there seems to be an issue w/ the HP ftp server rejecting anonymous connections so I couldn't download them. Hopefully they'll have it resolved soon. As for my problem with Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006- I'll have to install that on my desktop PC for now and use it there.