Although it may have been a smooth upgrade at the office, XP SP2 isn’t quite so happy with my home system…
The first sign of trouble was in the backup phase, when it couldn’t make a backup copy of atapi.sys, since the file was locked open. It let itself continue though, and I switched to another system to do some work. A little bit later I switched back and saw…a Blue Screen of Death. Sigh. (Though to be fair it is the first BSOD in XP I’ve ever seen on my home system, after a couple of years now.) Fortunately after rebooting it was able to roll back all the changes it had made so far, although it took numerous reboots and required rescanning and reconfiguring all of the device drivers, and it’s also making me reactivate the XP serial number. Annoying, but at least it’s not a dead system.
I’ll have to do a bit of research to figure out just what’s going wrong (I suspect it may be Daemon Tools interfering), but in the meantime I figured I’d put together a ‘slipstream’ CD image of XP with SP2 already applied, for future reinstalls. There are plenty of sites out there which will tell you how to do it, but unfortunately all of them require commercial CD image manipulation and burning tools which I don’t have under Windows. I do have plenty of tools available under Linux, though…
It wasn’t really all that difficult, all I had to do was create the slipstream directory via the usual process, copy it over top of a standard XP CD tree, get a copy of the CD’s boot sector, and run mkisofs with the right bootable options. Before long I had an ISO image, burned it to a CD-RW using the iBook (this is a true cross-platform experience), booted off of it, and got:
Hmmm, that doesn’t look very much like an XP install… Maybe it didn’t like having Rock Ridge extensions enabled. Or something. In the end the magic incantation that worked was:
mkisofs -v -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 0x7c0 -boot-load-size 4 -b xpboot.bin -c xpboot.cat -V WXPFPP_EN -P "MICROSOFT CORPORATION" -p "MICROSOFT CORPORATION" -o /test/xp/xp-sp2.iso -N -d -l -D -no-iso-translate -relaxed-filenames -hidden xpboot.bin .
where xpboot.bin comes from this site. Now it at least boots and goes through all of the usual install options, though I haven’t tried a full install with it yet.
Update: Apparently it was indeed Daemon Tools causing the trouble, and uninstalling it allowed the SP2 installation to complete successfully. Except now the game I’m working on (Freedom Force) doesn’t work — I get a dialog notifying me of a ‘known incompatibility’ between it and SP2, and it fails to start. Hopefully they fix it soon…
Weird. Fluffy installed it on his machine (which actually does dual-boot w/MDK 10), and had nothing but accolades to say about it.
Just goes to help me believe that what I’ve said all along still holds true: “service pack” is MS-speak for “apology that sometimes works… honest”. Silly Windows. :-)
Yea, I installed it no problem.. The only annoying thing I found is the security center taskbar item that does nothing and uses about 3MB ram.. Luckily, I found a way to disable it completely. If you’re interested then run ‘services.msc’ or find it in the menus, and disable a service called Security Center.. either that or set it to manual and stop it.