Windows 7 Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

Last night I needed to install a driver onto my Win7 laptop. So, as any normal (albeit geeky) user would do, I grabbed the install disk for my hardware, which in this case was a Pronto Remote, and went to town installing the application, driver, and tools from the OEM disk. I started configuring the TV remote, adding macros and channels for the new cable box. I saved the file and now was ready to download it to the remote.

Do you I know You?
Next I plugged in the USB cable on the remote to the laptop and waited for the two devices to acknowledge on another. And I waited... and waited.... No luck. the driver failed because of a "incorrectly configured INF file" Great... so let's go get the updated river from Philips, no problem, I've done this before. But here's what was strange: The Pronto remote has no updated driver, not for XP, Vista let alone Win7. Am I hosed?

So now what?
Luckily, when I installed Win7, I had enough forethought to keep my XP installation intact on a separate drive. Hard drives are so cheap these days, that it made sense to keep the old system, just in case. I popped open the panel on the bottom of the laptop and made the drive switch.

Hello, my old friend
Booting back into XP was a relief at this point. I had left the drive in hibernation mode so it came back to life right where I'd left off, as if nothing had happened. Now I needed to get the file for the remote from the Win7 drive. I used an external USB drive case to mount the drive and pull the file over into the XP world. I did the download and the remote was rockin'

Seven's Sins
After the file transfer, I re-installed the Win7 drive, thinking I could play with it a bit more, but NoooOOOoo, nothing is ever that simple with computers..... Now instead of the happy colorful swirling fireflies, I'm greeted with a black and grey screen telling me there's been a hardware malfunction. It mentioned something about the boot loader and the recovery disk. I think, perhaps when the Win7 boot drive was mounted in the XP operating system, XP did something to the root directory. Maybe it left one of its bird-poopy hidden files on it some where.

So whats next?
Now I'm in sort of a holding pattern. I need to Google a solution plan and sort through the myriad of solutions for problems that I don't have. Perhaps there's a simple fix, but knowing computers.... that's pretty rare.

UPDATE 06/03/09 7:52 pm:
Actually the recovery process was pretty easy. I booted from the CD image and chose recover. The whole process took 5 minutes. Not Bad. Now if they only had the right driver for the remote.....