Sunday, December 23, 2007

Update: Vista Service Pack 1 - Installation Nightmare

The repeated reboot madness continued until 7pm, for over 8 hours. I knew that my installation is doomed so I tried to recover the system from this situation. Earlier, the Safe Mode attempt and last known good configuration options didn't work. They work only if the system had crashed before.

The only option I had was repairing the installation through the recovery console using the original Vista DVD. This option also did not work because it couldn't figure out what went wrong with the installation. So, I tried RegEdit. My thinking was if I can delete any auto start programs, the SP update would stop. But I didn't find any such programs in known locations. I tried renaming some of the system folders and restarted Vista. Still, no luck.

Only at this point I realized that I never created System Restore Point before. Had I done that, I could have simply restored the system to a good state.

Finally, I gave up! Since, I have all the data on my hard drive intact, I initiated complete re-install of Vista Ultimate.

Once I installed it, I created a restore point first and kicked off SP1 update. This time, it worked flawlessly! It took about an hour and half.

Now, I am working on installing Office 2007 and other stuff. I think it is going to take couple of days to get everything restored the way it was before!!!

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