MiltonThales
Junior Member
This is my adventure with SP1 on a Dell Inspiron 530s. It is a cautionary tale, to help others from straying as I did into Upgrade Limbo.
This is a lightly used PC, with 1GB RAM and a 320GB disk. Vista Home Premium upgraded to Vista Ultimate, primarily for the backup function. I made a Complete PC Backup Jan.14, after transfering files from a prior Dell (which surprised me by going very well). Last weekend, I performed general clean-up and maintenance on the machine, and decided to apply SP1. Without making another backup. This is where I proclaim, Never Again.
What I did not realize was that the disk had soft defects in the filesystem. SP1 downloaded at 65MB from Windows Update, and began installing. After a reboot, it apparently began patching files, with nnnn/72521 (filename.xxx) appearing on the screen.
Until it hung with !! 0xc0190036 !! 3750/72521 (wlan.mof) on the LCD display.
The design defect is not that the upgrade process ran into an error. It is that there is no error handling provided for the error. Despite many attempts by me and Microsoft Support to recover from this situation, I ended up restoring the Jan 14 backup. Even after booting from the Ultimate Install DVD, running Startup Repair several times, making my way to the Command Console and running "Chkdsk /R C:" 3 times, and trying 2 System Restore points (both of which failed), nothing helped. I could not re-install the Vista Ultimate distribution because the install DVD said I should start the repair from the OS already on disk ! Which I could not get to because on every reboot, the SP1 process would start its file patching until it hung.
If there is a simple method to abort the SP1 process, Microsoft SP1 Support did not know of it, or at least never mentioned it to me, over about a 4 hour online chat. I have read elsewhere that deleting the defective or unmatching files will allow the process to proceed. But the location of the problem file is not given. Without the OS running I could not identify the tools to find the files. And I believe the filesystem corruption may have caused other problems.
Moral:
You may want to consider downloading the 445MB version of SP1, which I believe, contains the full versions of the files, and avoids attempting to patch whatever files are residing on the disk. That's what I did after restoring, updating, adding back other applications and clean-up programs. And making a new Complete PC Backup. This time, SP1 completed normally. So I guess I rank as only "once burned".
This is a lightly used PC, with 1GB RAM and a 320GB disk. Vista Home Premium upgraded to Vista Ultimate, primarily for the backup function. I made a Complete PC Backup Jan.14, after transfering files from a prior Dell (which surprised me by going very well). Last weekend, I performed general clean-up and maintenance on the machine, and decided to apply SP1. Without making another backup. This is where I proclaim, Never Again.
What I did not realize was that the disk had soft defects in the filesystem. SP1 downloaded at 65MB from Windows Update, and began installing. After a reboot, it apparently began patching files, with nnnn/72521 (filename.xxx) appearing on the screen.
Until it hung with !! 0xc0190036 !! 3750/72521 (wlan.mof) on the LCD display.
The design defect is not that the upgrade process ran into an error. It is that there is no error handling provided for the error. Despite many attempts by me and Microsoft Support to recover from this situation, I ended up restoring the Jan 14 backup. Even after booting from the Ultimate Install DVD, running Startup Repair several times, making my way to the Command Console and running "Chkdsk /R C:" 3 times, and trying 2 System Restore points (both of which failed), nothing helped. I could not re-install the Vista Ultimate distribution because the install DVD said I should start the repair from the OS already on disk ! Which I could not get to because on every reboot, the SP1 process would start its file patching until it hung.
If there is a simple method to abort the SP1 process, Microsoft SP1 Support did not know of it, or at least never mentioned it to me, over about a 4 hour online chat. I have read elsewhere that deleting the defective or unmatching files will allow the process to proceed. But the location of the problem file is not given. Without the OS running I could not identify the tools to find the files. And I believe the filesystem corruption may have caused other problems.
Moral:
- Make a complete backup (or equiv.) before starting SP1.
Run "CHKDSK /F C:" on your boot disk BEFORE SP1.
You may want to consider downloading the 445MB version of SP1, which I believe, contains the full versions of the files, and avoids attempting to patch whatever files are residing on the disk. That's what I did after restoring, updating, adding back other applications and clean-up programs. And making a new Complete PC Backup. This time, SP1 completed normally. So I guess I rank as only "once burned".
