I've built myself an HTPC from spare parts the other day. I don't remember if I mentioned that before or not. I've named the machine Satyr because I enjoy the pun. I'd originally though about installing XP Media Center Edition, but I didn't have it when I built the machine. Instead, I installed Fedora Core 4. My idea was to create a MythTV box.

After playing with it for awhile, I decided that wasn't a good idea. The main reason is that the tv-out support on the video cards I have was horrible. I finally got a copy of XP MCE 2005 and went to install it last night. That's when I discovered that you can't upgrade to XP from Linux. Granted, it took me awhile to figure that out.

When I went to install XP (all versions exhibited the same behavior), it would tell me that setup was inspecting my computer's hardware configuration, and then the screen would go blank. I verified the disk worked on another box. I also tried Windows 2000 which loaded setup fine.

My next thought was hardware compatibility. I removed everything that was nonessential piece by piece, and it continued to fail. Eventually (a few hours later), I gave up and decided to try and install 2000 and run a full install afterward from inside it. On a whim, I swapped install disks on the first reboot of 2000, before the graphical installation section. It worked.

Apparently, there's something in the boot sector that the XP install just despises. I had repartitioned the drive from the Windows 2000 recovery console previously, so it wasn't the Linux data. It had to be the master boot record. Totally bizarre.

On a side note, I'm currently listening to an inteview between Jon Udell (one of my favorite columnists at Infowolrd) and Bill Gates. It's pretty informative, but it's largely techincal. They're discussing the future direction of software development ala Office 12 and .NET 2.0.