2 Years ago, my Dell Studio laptop was shipped with Vista. Honestly, I was never terribly upset by Vista's performance except for its software incompatibilities for many major enterprise applications, at least w.r.t what I use. However, I tried to manage to install some of the applications like OBIEE, Teradata and Informatica (7.1 and 8.6), but with much effort involved with some tweaks and tricks. Luckily, Oracle had released Vista and Windows 7 compatible Oracle 10g Database which I used as Database platform for many applications.

For sometime, I even used XP in VM and used it for some R&D stuff - trying out different Oracle versions, and many others applications, but it was mainly used for very quick, R&D, referencing works but not for using it long hours. Reason being, VM was terribly slow on my Intel Centrino 4GB RAM laptop with Vista as Host OS!!

I had preferred XP as standalone OS that in VM, but XP can't (an older version) be installed easily with dual booting besides to Vista (which is a newer windows version). At one point I even wanted to wipe-off my Vista and install XP on laptop, but I wanted to continue as my warranty was still there, and there are bunch of softwares in Vista that me and my wife use and also I found it difficult to take backup of 320 Gig data.

Now, I couldn't hold it any longer. I finally ventured to install XP beside to Vista with dual booting. Steps you can follow...

I had only 1 partition (C:\ drive) with 300G and that was Vista's home. Dell shipped it that way. Of that, I wanted to allocate 50G specifically for XP.

1. So, I cleared some free space in C:\ and defragmented with free space optmization so all the available freespace on C: comes to tail end of it.
For this, I tried to use Windows Disk Defragmentor but that didn't help. One important reason being that system files can't be moved by Windows Defragmentor. So, use a third party defragmenting sofware - I used PerfectDisk - it works great. You need to disable Hibernation and Paging and do boot enabled defragmentation in PerfectDisk so that all the system files also would get moved.

2. Use the Windows Disk Management (under Computer Mangement) and shrink the C: drive and specify the size how much you want to shrink. In my case I wanted to shrink it from 300G to 250G. Doing so will leave 50G space as raw non-partitioned file system.

3. You need to create a new logical drive (D: in my case) using the 50G free space.

Install Windows XP with using a bootable CD (I used my XP SP3 CD). Here a challenge blows out. During the installation, while file copying in progress and even before accepting License Agreement, machine goes into blue screen. Problem here is, the recent HDD are SATA enabled, and Windows XP does not usually come with SATA drivers and XP does not recognize your HDD and hence the blue screen.

There are difference ways doing this-
1. Use a bootable floppy having SATA drivers and at the start of XP installation press F6 so it picks the drivers from Floppy disk. This F6Floppy option does not work for me as mine is laptop and floppy diskette is out of discussion. There seem a workaround using USB drive for Floppy drive, however I didn't try that.

2. Slipstreaming the SATA drivers using nLite. You can burn a bootable XP CD by integrating the SATA drivers that downloaded from vendor website. This link will help how to proceed with this step further.
Unfortunately, I have a problem with my CD/DVD writer and couldn't burn a new disk. So, I finally ventured with 3 option as described below. In nutshell, here I install XP first with compatible drivers and update the drivers to SATA and then re-enable HDD for SATA.

3. Go to BIOS setup and change HDD type from SATA to IDE.

4. Proceed with XP installation - there will not be any blue screen as IDE drivers are known to typical XP software bundle.

Here, there would be 2 issues you need to fix:

a)
- Note that when you install XP, already existing Vista's bootloader gets lost which means your machine behaves as if there is only one operating system to boot and directly boots up from XP, without even showing up dual boot menu at startup.
- So, let it first boot using XP, then use software like EasyBCD to recover the lost Vista boot record. With EasyBCD, you need to search for boot record available in C: drive (Vista home in my case) and add that to existing boot loader. You can get more details here. Doing this enabled Dual boot for Vista and XP.

b)
Another issue is re-enabling SATA. If I don't do this, Vista would not work - it blue screens out :). So, go to device manager and update the HDD drivers using the SATA drivers you have or downloaded. There are some cool instructions here on how to do this.

5. At this point your XP know how to support both SATA and IDE. So, restart the machine with SATA enabled back this time in the BIOS setup.

6. You should now be able to boot from XP as well as Vista

If anyone wants to give whole thing a try, and if you think I can be of any help, let me know...

Karteek

This post has been in my drafts for quite a long time. I noticed it today and it was almost ready to get published. So, with very minor changes, I am posting it today. Couple of months ago, I had setup 10g OEM in my laptop to try and explore it, and below explained were some challenges I had experienced. Hope they help...

(1)
Symptoms
- Oracle Enterprise Manager (null) - in the browser title
- Enterprise Manager is not able to connect to database instance - error message

OEM uses SYSMAN account to monitor a database.

Changing SYSMAN user's password is not a straight forward approach. We can straight away go ahead and change its password, but OEM can't recognize the new password. When OEM is deployed, at the time of dbconsole creation, SYSMAN's password gets captured in OEM's property file in encrypted format, and we have to fix that file as well when we decide to change SYSMAN password.

A googling of this issue helped with many sources...one I followed one is below

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=368185

In the discussion happened in above link, it was suggested to change
$ORACLE_HOME/host_sid/sysman/config/emoms.properties file with new password information without encryption. However, after we restart the dbconsole, "emoms.properties" file gets recreated automatically with encryption enabled back.

(2)
dbconsole: java.lang.exception: no such metric

By now, with the above fix described in (1), OEM was able to connect to the database, but the metric information was still not available. Reason being was similar to SYSMAN issue - OEM was unable to connect to Database using DBSNMP user. So, just make sure you provide the correct login details for DBSNMP (unlock it, if locked and setup with new password in "Monitoring Configuration"). Below link from Don Burleson helps...

http://www.dba-oracle.com/sf_error_dbconsole_java_lang_exception_no_such_metric.htm

- Karteek

You know I am still living with Vista :) Somehow I am managing it, though at times it becomes hard to work with it. Vista is cool, but other software's compatible with Vista…just a bit hard to find, and even if you find it, it would be hard to make it work with Vista.

I wanted to explore Teradata and so recently downloaded the latest Teradata 13 from www.teradata.com/downloadcenter/. Great news Teradata 13 officially supports Vista, and even Windows 7 – really cool!

It all worked for me…I could able able to query the tables using SQL Assistant well. But I experienced some issue with Teradata ODBC – driver was not getting loaded. When I use a DSN created using Teradata ODBC driver, it was throwing some error like “Specified driver could not be loaded due to system error 126”

Below error screen shot was when I used DataDirect driver. I had the same issue even with Teradata ODBC driver (I think Teradata either does not have a native driver or it recommends its ODBC driver – I could not see a Teradata native driver one like Oracle’s)

It appears it could not able to locate the actual driver file. But it is not – I verified the registry and it actually was pointing to a correct file.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\Teradata  =>  C:\Program Files\Teradata\Client\13.0\ODBC Driver for Teradata\Lib\tdata32.dll

After doing some research and googling, I realized that it actually not the driver but some of its supporting files causing this issue. There are few .dll files at the below location which perhaps were not getting loaded along with driver file.

C:\Program Files\Teradata\Client\13.0\Shared ICU Libraries for Teradata\lib

icudttd36l.dll
icuintd36.dll
icuiotd36.dll
iculetd36.dll
iculxtd36.dll
icuuctd36.dll

I added this location to the system path and it finally worked. In your case, if it does not work just by adding it to the path, copy the .dll files to windows\system32.

Hope it saves sometime when you encounter the similar issue :)

Update (04/25/2010):

It seems Teradata has its own CLI (Call-Level Interface) for clients to be able to connect database server via network. Following methods are supported by Teradata in the Network.

• NET Data Provider for Teradata
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
• OLE DB Provider for Teradata
• Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)
• Teradata CLIv2 for Network Attached Systems (also available for Channel Attached Systems)

Teradata documentation says that the client applications can use the following APIs to communicate with Teradata Database:

• NET Data Provider
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
• Open database Connectivity (ODBC)

Notice that there is no Teradata CLI to use it with a client.

Update (04/26/2010):

Few of the Teradata client tools like BTEQ and FastLoad are also experiencing the similar driver locating problem. Add the location “C:\Program Files\Teradata\Client\13.0\CLIv2” to your problem.

Problem Symptom: When you open FastLoad an error dialog box is thrown saying that “This application has failed to start because wincli32.dll was not found” and suggests to reinstall the software to fix the same. Please do not reinstall, I tried and it did not work. Like I said, just update your user/system path.

Karteek

It is same as on Vista! I did this yesterday on my friend's machine shipped with Windows 7.

http://karteekblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/powercenter-860-on-vista.html

Karteek

I just now installed and configured it, and also did a simple "Hello World” kind of test run which went fine.
Quite a simple installtion it was (especially on XP).

There are 2 differences between installation on Windows XP (32bit) and Vista:

1. appropriate .Net runtime Vista (it needs 1.1) and
2. picking up the right setup files

• Informatica 8.6\Server\Server\Windows\Disk1\InstData\VM\install.exe  - for installing server
• Informatica 8.6\Client\Client\Disk1\InstData\VM\install.exe  - for installing client