Win2k SP4 Disaster

Though I settled on the above title, I had several other candidates for this entry:

• The 24-Hour SP4 Install.
• Microsoft Sucks It.
• SP4 Does Not Play Nicely With LiteStep.

In short, I attempted to install Service Pack 4 for Win2k, Bad Things occured and Alex spent the next day reinstalling his OS.

If you’re running Windows 2000, you’re probably aware that Microsoft released SP4 a couple weeks ago. So, I downloaded all 132 MB of it on Sunday and started the installation just before heading off to the gym (since I knew it’d take a while).

I came back from the gym and the install was finished, prompting me to reboot my PC (this is all perfectly normal, so far). So, I rebooted but instead of my usual bootup sequence, I was greeted only with the text-mode message “NTLDR is missing Press Ctl+Alt+Del to restart”. I tried Ctrl-Alt-Del to reset the PC but it quickly brought me back to that same message.

At this point, I suspected that SP4 may not have worked well with my installation of LiteStep. If you’re not familiar with it, LiteStep is a free shell for Windows (screenshots) that replaces the look that Explorer provides (the taskbar, tray, and so on). Since Windows includes hooks for installing 3rd-party shells, installation is fairly easy.

But, I’m guessing that the SP4 installer made some assumptions about the installed shell and things went awry. I probably could have avoided some of this by temporarily switching back to Explorer for my shell, but that didn’t even occur to me at the time since all the previous Service Pack installations went fine :-/.

After eating some dinner, it was around 10pm and I had a PC with an ailment that I didn’t know how to solve. I first tried booting the Win2k installation CD and going into the recovery options — but those were ineffective (the recovery application saw no problems with my system). I next tried the recovery console built-in to the CD.

Using the console, I could poke around my drives and I could see that all my data was still there. But, without knowing the specific cause of my problem, there wasn’t much more I could do. I was about to call someone to see if he or she could look up that NTLDR message in Google (since my PC is the only computer in the apartment). But, I then remembered that my recently-bought Palm Tungsten C has a WiFi-based web browser built-in.

That seemed like a good idea, at first, but it became frustrating after a while. Sure, I could search Google and read webpages, but it just wasn’t that easy to to browse tech forums and Microsoft’s Knowledge Base on a PDA screen. More than that, it seemed that this NTLDR problem had a wide range of possible causes (many of them centering around installing Win2k over Win9x, but that wasn’t the case here).

As far as I could tell, my master boot record had become partially corrupted — that might have explained how I had some booting problems while the partition table remained intact. And I noticed that there was a command available in the recovery console for repairing MBRs (fixmbr), but it also included the warning that it could end up erasing all my partitions (doh!). Considering that as a worst case scenario I could always put my drive in another machine to get the data off it, I didn’t want to risk deleting my partition table and losing that option. But after all this fiddling, it was getting late, so I resolved to head off to Fry’s the next day to see what kind of recovery software they might have.

I went to Fry’s on Monday and I was initially looking for a CD-burning program that could boot off the CD drive (that way, I figured, I could backup my current drive and then try the fixmbr command without worry). But, it appeared that no such beast existed. However, I did find Partition Commander which could boot off its own CD and also included a feature that they called BootFixer which purported to fix many NT/2k/XP boot problems. So, $50 later, I had a copy of Partition Commander and headed home.

Once home, I booted off the Partition Commander CD and ran BootFixer. It gave me some kind of ambiguous success message (something along the lines of “boot sequence ok”) so I wasn’t sure if it actually fixed anything or whether it thought my drive was fine as-is. But, I rebooted my PC just to be sure. Amazingly enough, the Windows boot process went forward.

But, my elation was short-lived. It got through the initial loading-Windows message (the one in white text on the black background) and it got to the Windows splash-screen loading sequence as well. But, just before the “Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to Logon” message would normally have appeared, my box rebooted itself. Bother.

I next figured that I could try reinstalling Windows on top of itself (since I had the feeling that I was “this close” from a working system). So, I once again booted from the Win2k installation CD. I chose the option for installing Windows and proceeded through several prompts. But, it came to inform me that I needed 768 MB free (!) to install Windows. Of course, I didn’t have that much space free, but I probably didn't need it anyway since the install process would only be overwriting existing files anyway. <villain-voice>Mah, foiled again!</villain-voice>

It took a bit of thinking to figure out how I should proceed. I had a spare hard drive in my closet (from my yet-unfinished new PC plans), so I had the idea that I could install Windows on to that drive, move some data over from my old drive, and then I’d have enough free space on that drive to reinstall Windows.

Of course, it dawned on me that I needn’t jump through so many hoops. So, I resolved that I’d rebuild my system through install Windows onto the new drive along with all the rest of my usual apps. At first, I was dismayed at the prospect of having to reinstall everything, but I then realized that the task wasn’t actually that difficult but merely hugely time consuming ;).

So, I was installing software for most of yesterday. Typically, I’d start the installation and grab a magazine to read, looking up occasionally to hit Next or Continue. It also eased my nerves to have some Pantera playing in the background (thanks for dropping those off, Connie). And the Bloodhound Gang that I stuck in the changer didn’t hurt either, since it's hard to stay grumpy with that kind of silliness :).

In any case, I’m now back on a working and healthy Win2k system. And, I’m still not particularly pleased that it took 24 hours to get through what should have been about a half-hour install process for SP4. Just to be clear, if you’re running Win2k, I’m not saying that you should shy away from SP4 — I think my unique circumstances caused the anomalies and it’ll probably install just fine on your system.