I disconnected my SATA drive with my XP installation, and used my old 40gb drive to try and test this out. Has anyone else had success installing this? I'm not. Using another comp now. :\ Not really that pissed, because if it ends up not working it's not like I lost my XP installation (since it's on another drive that will remain disconnected until I'm done fiddling with Vista.)
I know that the upgrade option, while available, does not work, as MS mentions this in the txtfile; from other information I have gathered, you are to have two partitions. One having another MS OS (I put Windows 2000 on it because it installs quickly on a 2400+/1GB machine), and then the other partition would have the beta of vista, installed FROM the OS you first put on. So of course, I installed it from Windows 2000, but not as an upgrade. It finished the first GUI based portion of setup and the comp then restarted. I also copied the disc contents to the hard drive (the same partition that I intend to have Vista on) for faster access (the drive is 5400rpm, so file transferring is slow enough to begin with).
A choice menu of either Windows 2000, Windows Vista Beta, or Windows Vista Beta Setup appears. If you choose Windows 2000, it can't find ntoskrnl.exe. This is to be expected however, according to what I've read in a file that came with the beta and on other sites (which is why I did not put it on the same drive that I have my stable XP installation on.

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So of course I had to restart. I messed up here, I think - by selecting Windows 2000 it seems like it corrupted everything. I did do this by accident however. Now the menu just has Windows 2000 and Vista as options - setup is gone! If you try to run Vista, it says it can't find the file \system32\winload.exe. It did say to put in the vista disc, and from setup, choose repair. The setup repair program looks very very promising, but as of right now it really sucks. It could not automatically fix the issue, even though it was just a few files that were missing, which (I would assume) a completed repair program would be able to successfully do. Reason being is because all it has to do is decompress the needed files from the disc and then put it on the hard drive.
Then, if you restart again, you now have two options, both of them saying "Microsoft Windows." :lol Buggy as hell.
I am going to try again. I think when I hit Windows 2000 (accidently) the first time instead of Windows Vista Setup (I assume it's still there because that's for it to complete, something that it would automatically go to in the final version of setup?) But yeah, running Windows 2000 must have fucked it up. So now I gotta either repair or reinstall Windows 2000 and try again, yay.