Windows Vista Ulitmate upgrade FAILED

I ran into two unexpected situations trying to upgrade my Windows XP desktop
to Vista Ultimate.

First off, I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor several times over the course of
a week to make sure I knew what I needed. The hardware checked out fine: AMD
Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 2.20 Ghz processor, 1.00 GB of RAM, 250 GB primary
drive NTFS, 200 GB slave drive NTFS, NVIDIA GeForce 7500 LE - 256 MB. Should
have been a slam dunk right?

Programs were all good expect for the Norton Partition Magic 8.0 and Ghost
10.0. The Vists advisor flagged both programs: "This program might have
minor compatibility issues after upgrading to Windows Vista. For more
information, go to the vendor's website." The Ghost recovery points were on
the slave drive, so there should have been no issues. The Vista target drive
was the primary drive. I backed up my files. And I have to stress the point
that you need to back up all your files including your favorites. This
proved to be a wise move. The other thing that saved me was the Ghost
recovery points. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, I started the upgrade using the 32 bit disk. The 64 bit disk would
not work at all. It kept giving me the message that neither hard drive was
suitable, eventhough both physical drives were partitioned as NTFS. I
started at 6:15 pm, and the upgrade made it through the first segment when it
went to reboot after collection files. And the messages along the way told
me that it would have to reboot. That's when the party ended! It came back
and delivered an "Unknown error" which left it in an indefinite state. I
thought to try rebooting again, but then it tried installing from the DVD and
asked me for the software key again. I entered it and it came back with a
message: "To use the Product key, start the installation from your exisiting
version of Windows". Huh? Is that the XP version that is being replaced or
the Vista version that is all $%#@&'d up at this point. I tried to reboot
again and it started back from the place before it rebooted, and delivered
another error - "Error Code: 0XC000005". At this point I have to comment
that I knew I was hosed. Once again, an MS Windows OS upgrade had ended in
failure.

FORTUNATELY, I had backed up my files and I had a Ghost recovery point set
from the night before on the slave drive. I took out the failing Vista
upgrade DVD and put the Ghost recovery disk and 20 minutes later, I was back
running Windows XP with all my programs and files in tact.

LESSONS: I would not ever use the upgrade path to MS Vista. I would just
do a clean install. Just like all the other Windows loads I have done for
the past 10 yrs. Why did this upgrade fail? Who the %$@% knows!