VGC-VA1 Vista upgrade woes, network hardware not found

[Activ8]

Hi, I've just added an additional hard drive to my VGC-VA1 and also upgraded the ram to 2gb. So, now that I have additional drive space I thought I would install the Vista Home Premium upgrade which I ordered a few months back.

I moved all my data files to the new hard drive and installed Vista to a new partition alongside XP as a dual boot setup. I installed Vista as a full version as per the workaround that's available on the 'net.

Once I'd finished installing everything and updated the BIOS, I booted into Vista and found that neither the wired lan adapter or wireless lan adapters had been detected. I tried plugging a PCMCIA lan adapter into the CardBus slot in the hope that Vista would install it and allow me to get any updates from the 'net and possibly fix the problem. Didn't work, it seems that the CardBus slot isn't detected either. Running Media Centre gave an error that the TV Tuner isn't found as well.

I ran Belarc Advisor and sure enough, none of these hardware devices show up. I then booted back into XP, all the hardware works fine and on running Belarc Advisor they are listed.

I then dowloaded and ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor and that correctly identifies the lan, wireless lan and CardBus devices, go figure!

I've had a search of this forum and on the 'net in general, there seem to be many problems with tuner not found in Vista Media Centre but surely detecting a lan adapter shouldn't fail.

Does anyone else have experience or upgrading this machine to Vista, or ideas to get either of the lan adapters working?

Many thanks,

Richard

[Blencogo]

Hi Richard,

Is this the Vista Express Upgrade from Moduslink or is it a retail version of Vista?

If it is the Express Upgrade, this is already a clean install of the full version (not an upgrade) and contains all the neccessary drivers and utilities to install.

Are you sure this "workaround on the 'net" has access to all the neccessary drivers?.

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downloads/os/vista/upgrade.html

[Activ8]

Hi Richard,

Is this the Vista Express Upgrade from Moduslink or is it a retail version of Vista?

If it is the Express Upgrade, this is already a clean install of the full version (not an upgrade) and contains all the neccessary drivers and utilities to install.

Are you sure this "workaround on the 'net" has access to all the neccessary drivers?.

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downloads/os/vista/upgrade.html

 

Hi Blencogo,

I used the Vista Express Upgrade from Moduslink, I desperately didn't want to lose my XP licence and to install Vista in a seperate dual boot setup. Does installing the Vista Express Upgrade negate the XP Licence Key?

The "workaround on the 'net" simply involves installing Vista without entering the licence key, this installs Vista as a 30 day trial version. You then re-install Vista, from within Vista and this then "upgrades" the Vista Upgrade version to a full version.

I basically have installed Vista from the Moduslink dvd, installed the Drivers Disk and Applications Disk. The network cards and the CardBus adapter don't appear in Device Manager. I noticed during the install that an AverMedia TV Card driver was installed but this again doesn't appear in Device Manager. The only Sound and Vision entry in Device Manager is the SigmaTel C-Major audio driver.

All the best,
Richard