SP3 - what a piece of ****

[IO540]

Just put SP3 on my Thinkpad x60s which I use for fairly critical flight planning functions.

Installs OK and then asks to reboot... the laptop then blue-screens upon reboot. Safe Mode doesn't work (same BSOD). The BSOD says "registry corrupted" but it's deeper... Thinkpad diagnostics report a checksum error from the IDE interface (or something like that) suggesting the KD controller or the HD are duff, but the diagnostics also do manage to open up an explorer view of the HD and offer to restore the files from it.

However, TrueImage10 (which I use on all machines to create a boot CD and an image) boots OK but says it cannot find a hard drive to which to restore an image. Yet TI doesn't use Windoze - it uses its own stuff but it still fails to see the HD. Really weird. I wonder if TI fails to see a SATA HD?

Safe Mode starts up, loads a load of drivers and then does the same BSOD. So this is another recovery avenue lost.

It looks like SP3 corrupted something pretty comprehensively.

A google turns up thousands of hits on PCs rendered useless and having to be restored to shop state. It's an absolute scandal.

I had auto updates disabled on this laptop because auto update runs up massive 3G bills... should have left them like that for ever!

The Lenovo dealer who does repairs on these says he has seen loads of laptops totally lost as a result of SP3.

Does anybody know of something I could try?

I have a TI image backup which is recent enough but if I can't restore it, it is back to square one and a couple of days wasted installing everything.

[BOAC]

Did you find this blog? About half-way down is his 'tool' to deslect the problem driver file "intelppm.sys".

[IO540]

I did indeed find much on that solution, but it applies only to AMD systems. The Thinkpad uses an Intel CPU.

The blog does however contain other solutions, but I can't run any of them. Safe Mode doesn't work, and the recovery console needs an XP CD which I don't have - these don't come with laptops these days.

I am happily copying the data off the HD (8GB of it) to a networked computer as I write this, but I can't see any way of getting back to the original working laptop, because all the apps load stuff into the registry etc and that will all be lost.

It looks like getting hold of an XP CD and using the recovery console and uninstall SP3 will be the best way...

[green granite]

You could try changing the SATA Mode setting to IDE in BIOS. this might let you do an image restore from true image. I don't know what the setting will be called in whaterver your BIOS is but it should be in 'main'

[IO540]

I think you are bang on.

The BIOS shows the controller as SATA.

It offers two modes: AHCI and "Compatibility Mode". If all else fails, I will try Trueimage, using the latter mode.

In the meantime, all the files got copied off the HD OK....

[Keef]

There are several warnings in here saying "Don't let SP3 near your computer".

Some folks have no problems, and wonder what the fuss is about.

Others have been through the pain. I had the problem on one machine, and eventually got it back to SP2 and working OK. I then turned OFF all automatic updates, wherever they are, and on all my computers. The stuff where I'm interested in updates knows to tell me when there is one available, and I'll decide whether or not to install it.

Apple's pesky iTunes/ iPod updaters ignore the "don't do it" setting, but ZoneAlarm knows not to let them through so they fall at that hurdle.

[HandyAndy]

IO

In case you still have further problems getting TI to boot via the Rescue CD, it might be worthwhile searching (or explaining your predicament) on the TI forum here Official Acronis Support Forum - Wilders Security Forums

I am pretty sure they will know how to help you get TI started so you can restore your image backup.

[HandyAndy]

IO

Just had a quick look on the Acronis forum and found these snippets (apparently, earlier versions of TI did have trouble with SATA drives):

1.
Download the TI2009 demo and make the restore CD and see if it will find/restore your existing archive. If it does, then you know an upgrade is in your future.

You have come unstuck at probably the most common place when doing a restore - trying the recovery CD for the first time when you really need it and then finding there is a problem.

2.
Thanks to the both of you. Installed the TI2009 Demo and made a Rescue CD. It worked like a charm. Found the drives and i managed to restore the system partition (C).

Maybe if you download TI2009 trial to another pc and make a rescue cd, you could try that in your "broken" system.

[IO540]

OK guys, thanks to the leads here I have done it!

To start with, this MSKB article offers four possible methods. 1 2 3 are not usable with a dead computer but #4 "should be". You need a real XP boot CD and then use the recovery console to uninstall SP3.

Except that this didn't work.... SP3 stayed installed, or at least partially. And the machine remained dead. One could use F8 to enter the Safe Mode and this started up OK, for about 5 secs, and then another BSOD with the same 'corrupted registry' message...

Method #4 ran as described in the MSKB article (with loads of error messages) but evidently failed because most of the files it was trying to restore were 'access denied' - the usual windoze issue.

M$ offer a free "SP3 disaster support line" in the USA (as mentioned in the blog referred to above) but on that US number they won't discuss it with anybody outside the USA. They gave me a UK # but they don't have the SP3 support option. However, if you call it - 0870 6010100 - and select the option for the pukka business customers with prepaid support contracts (the £200/phone call kind of thing) and fairly decisively state that you have a dead ex-SP3 machine and that M$ claims to offer free support on SP3 disasters, they will support you and assign a case number to you and you get transferred to a "specialist".

So... I spent about 2 hours on the phone to a chap in India. Actually he wasn't too bad. He was very pleasant but didn't know anything I did not know already or did not find in 5 mins on google but he clearly had staff behind him who knew of the many ways SP3 can kill machines and he was frequently referring to this 2nd level support.

He went straight to the above mentioned MSKB option #4 but that didn't work even 2nd time. Eventually he suggested doing a Repair - this needs the XP boot CD too and you press R at the installation menu. Like most laptops, the Thinkpad did not come with an XP CD but I pulled one out of an old XP SP2 developer's kit

The Repair process claims to take ~ 35 mins but actually it took more like 10 hours. The machine looks like it has crashed and then wakes up after a while. It asked for some files I didn't have but luckily I had them saved:

I had earlier managed to grab all the data off the HD by entering the Thinkpad Diagnostics (located in the ROM) and these have enough network functionality to enable the HD, or specified files, to be copied to a networked computer. I thus saved all the data to another PC - all 20GB of it! This data set could not be used as a whole because it had the duff SP3 installation, but obviously one could pick off selected files from it, as well as any normal application data.

I used this data set to locate the files which the Repair process was after. They were on the HD all along but windoze was too stupid to find them, and the Search function (right click on a folder etc) is not functional during the Repair process so you cannot use it to search the HD of the machine that's being repaired

The Repair process also asks for the XP license key, which luckily was stuck on the bottom of the laptop....

Now it is back up and running. A few quirks with a few things and XP says it is not activated and I have 30 days to do that...

And yes the HD is a SATA one which without a doubt is why Trueimage would not find the HD. But, in the BIOS, there is a choice of two modes, AHCI and Compatibility. I used the latter during the Repair process and then set it back to AHCI. Unfortunately this stopped the machine booting!! Obviously this is the old windoze story where SATA appears as SCSI and one has to insert a floppy (!!) disk with the SCSI driver while pressing F6 during boot-up. I will have to deal with this separately; I do have a USB floppy drive. Windoze did discover a new "RAID" device during a subsequent startup but failed to find the drivers for it... so I am back in the Compatibility mode on the HD which runs just fine. I have no idea what the SATA driver file is called but will look for it another day. It's just as well that the Thinkpad BIOS has a mode where the SATA hardware can be made to look like bog standard IDE!! But it's a useful lesson learnt - Trueimage won't restore to a SATA drive unless you get a recent version so many of my "image backups" (done off desktop machines with SATA controllers) are probably useless, especially as there are loads of SATA controllers out there, and most of them don't have the IDE lookalike mode. However, TI did not work even in Compatibility mode, but worked after a reinstall.

A few progs had to be reinstalled. Daemon Tools (for mounting ISO images as virtual drives) needed a reinstall. Acrobad writer v7 did its own reinstall (?). So far, it looks like a success. And the Windows Installer Service needs to be updated, according to Acrobat 7 which tries to reinstall itself on every startup.

The RAID driver (which got trashed by the Repair procedure) is here and yes it needs to be copied to a 3.5" diskette...

Automatic updates are of course disabled now

A friend works for a huge (vast) IT hardware company and they won't touch SP3 with a bargepole.

THANK YOU ALL.

[frostbite]

Glad to hear you're sorted but this attitude from M$ and so many other companies these days really gets me steaming.

They sell you a deficient or defective product which costs you a great deal of time and inconvenenience, then try to disclaim all responsibility, finally offering limited support for a fee.

The fee in this case being that 0870 number.

[IO540]

Just a little post mortem... the above Repair process trashed the bluetooth setup, and a day later I still cannot get a BT connection to a mobile phone working as a dial-up modem. I might reinstall the original Thinkpad BT drivers. Really weird, and what a waste of time.

One has to be careful because having got to this stage, every time you expose the computer to M$ updates, SP3 will be presented prominently at the top of the list, every time for ever, and it would be easy for someone less than well informed to just download and install it.

[green granite]

As a mater of interest did you let it do the sp3 as an automatic update or did you down load the SP3 service pack and then install it, only most of the problems with it seem to come from the auto-update method rather than installing it from the downloaded version.

[IO540]

As a mater of interest did you let it do the sp3 as an automatic update or did you down load the SP3 service pack and then install it, only most of the problems with it seem to come from the auto-update method rather than installing it from the downloaded version.

I did the latter - a manual Microsoft Update request to microsoft.com.

Here's another update on this sorry saga:

The Repair process worked but left some stuff not working. Basically any app storing stuff in the windows registry got trashed, and this suprisingly includes Adobe Acrobat v7 user registration data, so I had to re-license that.

The biggest problem was that Bluetooth stopped working. I spent 2 WHOLE DAYS on this and after a lot of work, including rolling back drivers etc I got the laptop to recognise the BT device (a satellite phone) but any modem configured to use the resulting serial port does not work. This config used to be so simple, and it works with the same phone on other devices I have.

Eventually I gave up and decided to restore a Trueimage HD image; last one was 12/2007 but this laptop had not changed much since then with just a few apps installed.

TI v8 did not recognise the SATA HD even when it was BIOS-configured for Compatible IDE mode, but (thanks to the above hint) downloading the 15-day trial TI 2009 from their website worked. The 15-day trial period is in fact immaterial since one needs to merely install the boot disk creator on the target machine, and this bit of TI does not keep track of usage or date... The boot disk creater makes a bootable CD which contains a reasonably full version of TI which does not need windoze to run, supports networks (and networked drives and PCs etc), USB drives & mice etc etc.

So, using TI 2009 boot disk I restored the 12/2007 image.

The laptop works fine as expected.

But bl00dy Bluetooth has not come back!! I can still find the BT phone, pair with it, get a COM port popping up (under Ports in C/Panel), assign a generic 19200 bd modem to that port, and create a dial-up networking connection with that modem. This is the standard procedure. But when I dial (either *99# for GPRS or 1722 for the Thuraya dial-up service) the dialer reports a hardware failure - just as it was doing before the final image restore.

Really weird but this is as far as I can go... What a massive waste of time. I can only imagine that something connected with the SP3 installation trashed some EEPROM config on the Bluetooth radio in the laptop. I could try replacing the BT radio module but probably won't bother - I can connect the phone using a USB cable.

[socrates]

simple solution; buy a mac...

Windoze vista = updated glossy win98