Greg's Vista Service Pack 1 Odyssey

[gstelmack]

I've been using computers for a LONG time. I started with a Commodre Vic20, worked through a 64, two Amigas, went through the sad process of switching to PCs, building many myself, using DOS 3.5, the EMM stuff, trying OS/2, dabbling in Linux, Win95, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, now Vista. I remember reinstalling Win95/98 every six months or so as it grew unstable. I've had to reinstall XP a couple of times due to various things I did to it (either new hardware, or after I beta-tested XP SP1). I've used Vista for just over a year.

In all that time I have never been without a computer for more than a couple of days while building or fixing something.

Until now.

My odyssey began last Wednesday evening when I saw Vista SP1 on Windows Update and clicked the "Install Updates" button. I went to bed with it at 74% of Stage 1 of 3. My odyssey is not yet complete, as I still do not have a functional computer.

Over the rest of today as I have time during builds and whatnot I'll get everyone caught up. Then I'll continue to update daily until I have a working box. Maybe some will learn the trouble-shooting tricks and tips I've picked up, and maybe some will have some useful suggestions.

I'll try to keep this technical. I'll have some comments on Vista vs XP (especially on Vista's alleged "recovery" process), but I don't want half the posts to be things like "Vista sucks!" or "long-live XP!". I LIKED Vista while I was using it, and it does have merits whether you want to admit it or not, but yes by the time this is through I will PROBABLY have XP SP2 on my main machine.

On to the saga...

[Daimyo]

Vista has pretty good backup/recovery... did you make the recovery DVDs first?

I put SP1 on my home and work desktops without issue. On my work tablet it doesn't even show up as an option on Microsoft Update and that's starting to annoy me...

[gstelmack]

I was using Norton 360 for backup. I figured System Restore and the shadow stuff would help. Ha! I do have all my documents stuff backed up (and have tested the restore in Norton from my wife's computer) so I'm not losing data, just time.

So I woke up Thursday morning to discover my computer on a black DOS-like screen with a Windows Boot Error telling me that ACPI.SYS was missing or corrupt. Fortunately (or not) I was feeling pretty sick and my wife was even sicker, so I was going to be home from work. I immediately boot from the Vista DVD and select the "Repair" option.

Self-repair fails saying it can't auto-fix the problem and would I like to report it to Microsoft? I say yes, annoyed since XP would just re-copy system files and get you running.

System Restore can't find any restore points to go back to. This is really annoying, since I watched when get created a month or two back when I installed something else, and why didn't SP1 create one? I've found other web reports that trying to simply run the repair bits from the Vista disk can wipe the restore points and the "Last Good" configuration, which is just peachy.

And of course that means that "Restore Last Known Good Configuration" can't find anything either.

Okay, I've been here before with XP. That means you just go back to the OS install and re-install it. I won't lose data, but I might have to re-install some programs. So reboot from the DVD and select "Install". It starts up and asks for my product key. I type it in, it works for a few minutes, and then drops the bombshell: since I have an "Upgrade" copy, I can only re-install with this product key FROM WITHIN WINDOWS! Which of course I can't get to.

So at this point all the standard "restore the OS to a point prior to SP1 installation" tricks that I have from old OS installs have fallen by the wayside. I have NO CLUE what to do next. So on my wife's machine I go to Microsoft support and open up the chat option.

I spend the next two hours on a chat with a guy who is trying to help me get the system back. We of course walk back through everything I did above, and I'm very patient as I may well have missed a step. I didn't, and he's shocked to find no System Restore points. We back up the registry and restore an old one, but that does not help. We then start hunting for a backup copy of ACPI.SYS to restore and he can't find one. So after two hours, he gives up and escalates me to the research arm of tech support. He sets up an appointment for them to call me back on Friday (fortunately I'm scheduled to be home). I thank him and start doing more digging.

I find on the web how to find ACPI.SYS. He had me poking around in C:\Windows\WinSXS, but it's not in there. Instead it's buried in subdirectories UNDERNEATH there, one for each version you've ever installed. So I find one, copy it back to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers, and lo-and-behold my machine boots back to Vista.

Except for two problems. First, it's dog slow, and the hard drive is just HAMMERING away. I leave it alone, and about 3 hours later the drive stops doing its thing. I assume the OS was cleaning up, and I reboot. I get a "Completing Updates" window for a few minutes, and then it reboots. More HD work, although only about 10 or 15 minutes, and I poke around a bit. Reboot again, get "Running stage 3 of 3"? It never finished installing the SP, and I'm in a hybrid state.

So now I make the second critical mistake (the first being to download SP1 in the first place instead of waiting a couple of weeks for issues to get ironed out): I download the full install package, turn off my virus scanner, and re-run the install. Mind you there are discussions out there about this being the correct next step, but boy was this a mistake.

On reboot ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt. I go back through my WinSXS copy bits, and end up over multiple reboots restoring ntoskrnl.exe, PSHED.DLL, tcpip.sys, and ntfs.sys. On the last reboot, it bluescreens and reboots. Booting into safemode goes through the driver loading, bluescreens and reboots.

And again none of the repair options on the DVD can do a darn thing.

So I put the machine aside and await the call from Research on Friday...

[gstelmack]

So on Friday I get the call back from the Research group at tech support. He double-checks a couple of things with me, and it is decided that my registry is messed up and it's trying to load bad drivers. After discovering that devmgt.msc can't be run, and that msconfig wants me to be an Administrator (even after using Notepad's File Open dialog to do "Run As Administrator) and won't run, he says he needs to check with his colleagues and get some additional troubleshooting tips.

I get a call back about 10 minutes later, and he lets me know he needs to do some deeper research. Everyone seems stumped by the whole Administrator access thing. About an hour later, it's decided that the registry is messed up, causing it load bad drivers, and he walks me through restoring the registry. We do that, and I still bluescreen.

At this point he needs to escalate me again, and asks when a good time is during the week for the development team to call me back. I tell him, and he lets me know it will be at least Monday for them to call back. I thank him, hang up, and figure out how to make it through the weekend without my computer. Having two young children takes care of that problem.

[Wolfpack]

Eek. My wife's thinking about wanting me to build a new machine for her use and I had been considering getting Vista, but you are making me gunshy with this stuff. Hope you can get it straightened out. Any chance you can just nuke the hard drive in some way and install XP, then re-do the upgrade step? I know I had to go through that at least making the hops from vanilla XP to later SPs when I had hard drive problems and had to get it replaced. I'd assume you'd have thought of this and believe the answer to be "no" but wanted to ask anyway.

[gstelmack]

More details to come in a bit, but that's the punchline: I believe I am at the "wipe the drive to install XP" stage (since I have an upgrade Vista, I have to get XP back on there to reinstall Vista anyway).

I have been a huge Vista defender here and I love the OS. My main issue is the copy-protection / product key garbage they put in that nuked all my standard XP trouble-shooting techniques. I was floored when I could not simply re-run the install process thanks to the product key issue. If I decide to stick with XP on this box and with the one I'll be building in June, it will most likely be because of that reinstall issue, not because of the OS itself.

I'll get to my Monday experience soon.

[gstelmack]

So no phone call from Microsoft Monday night. Back to the web and Googling. I fairly quickly find a post on Microsoft's TechNet forums about issues with ntoskrnl.exe on reboot after installing Vista SP1 RC1 (yeah, that makes me feel good that this issue was in RC1). There is a list of files to replace from the original Vista CD along with instructions that got lots of people working again.

So I go through all of those copies, and also make sure I go back on the other files I had replaced. No dice. Try a couple of ways, try some of the restore options, still no dice. Still bluescreening / rebooting while loading up drivers.

I head to bed Monday night still without a working machine.

[gstelmack]

Last night (we're at Tuesday now), still no call from Microsoft, and I'm dead in the water. So it's time to put XP back on the machine. If I eventually decide to go back to Vista, I need to do this anyway as my Upgrade copy requires XP installed and working (I assume validated, although I may test this) before it will install again. Stick the XP disk in, boot from it, and start the install process.

Silly me, though, forgets that my 250GB drive was barely a blink in anybody's eye when they shipped XP in 2001. So after it wipes my Windows directory (as intended during the XP install) and after CHKDSK finishes fixing all the drive errors that created, I go back to my wife's machine and look up the instructions to slipstream service pack 2 onto your original XP installation. That takes a good while (especially when Roxio 9 doesn't have the correct settings to create a proper bootdisk, so I have to install Roxio 6 on the backup server and try again), and then I try again.

This time I get an "access denied" error when the setup reboots and starts installing files. From what I can find on the net, it's not that simple to roll back from Vista to XP, and you generally have to wipe the drive.

So I restored the data backup that Norton 360 maintains for me on our file server onto my wife's machine and verified that my data is safe. Tonight I let XP wipe the drive and see if I can get a working machine back.

An interesting side note to this is that in 3 months I should have my tax rebate check, which will immediately go to NewEgg for parts for a brand new box, and this will become my 3-year-old son's machine. So I may just leave it at XP for his software. The big debate will be does the new rig get Vista 64bit like I wanted to put on it, or do I play it safe and stick with XP (which should have SP3 by that point)? Not sure how that will play out.

I'll report tomorrow on how the XP install went. The one part that makes me nervous is the whole 250GB SATA drive thing. I think XP will handle this fine with SP2 installed, otherwise I have to slipstream SATA drivers onto the CD and try again.

[gstelmack]

I should add that part of my debate about OS for the new machine is the new hardware that it will have. Getting XP onto some of the newer multicore boxes can be problematic due to driver issues. If I do decide to that route, it's my hope that SP3 will have proper drivers, etc. If not I may almost be forced into putting Vista on it.

[gstelmack]

Fresh clean install of XP SP2 CD went flawlessly, blowing away everything on the hard drive.

I then decided to tempt fate. My problem is that Vista is out there and I really need to be familiar with it, so I immediately popped my Vista CD back in and am installing it all nice and clean again. So far that is going smoothly. I will then get it updated through SP1 immediately (no other hardware added first, etc) and see how that goes.

Worst case is I start over again tomorrow doing a clean install of XP, and I've only lost one more day.

One item of note: XP did not need to be activated for the Vista Upgrade to install, just installed.

[gstelmack]

Vista is installed and patched, although SP1 is not an option in Windows Update. Now to get software back on, and then get back to the WOOF website.

[ShaneTheMaster]

Glad to see you back up. Your posts alone are having me take a wait and see attitude as far as SP1 in concerned.