Good Lord, so many times I tried to install the SP2 on my Dell Dimension 4500.
My problem was always the Bluescreen Horror after rebooting and I spent all these hours restoring to SP1!!!
Problem for me was that I had partitioned the C-drive (having multiple XP-installations) and after reboot the booting did not find the system. I really tried all options, using Norton System Works Premier boot-CD and XP recovery console. But everything failed. And, cursing Dell for not supporting the problem (other then a link to Microsoft on how to restore to SP1), I thougt I had to buy myself a new computer.
Until I the other day found the soloution using the XP Recovery Consol.
The crucial issue was that I had to change the booting path using bootcfg command. This command scans the drive for XP istallations and lets you add and bootable installations.
I had to do this on both partitions seperately and after doing that I can now easyly switch between my two XP installations.
TIP : A very useful thing to do before you do the SP2 install, is to install the Recovery Console on you C-drive On restarting / rebooting you then get the option to boot into the recovery console on the hard disk and it will load very much faster from there than from a cd-drive.
The bootcfg command "add" solved my problem. After some trial and error I messed up the boot-ini file and had to cleans it using the boot.ini edit function described in the bottom part oft the page here :
http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/bootini.htm
Well, I just wish that Dell would have figured this out for me .... It would have saved me so many hours failing to install the Windows XP SP2.
/fred
My first question is...... how important is SP2 ?? Is the security a big issue if you're running McAfee Suite with Virus Scan, Firewall Plus and their Privacy Service. My web access is Comcast highspeed cable.
I have tried to upgrade to SP2 4 times now. First 3 times were about a year ago maybe longer. Each time I experienced huge problems that manifested themself over a period of a couple days to maybe a week, eventually leading to the blue screen of death. I would wipe clean and re-install following Dell's proceedures for XP reinstalls (complicated instructions for a dullard like me.... huge headache!). I thought maybe my problems were spyware related so I would run Spybot each time as well as the MS beta app. 'Antispyware'. After the third reinstall and SP2 attempt I just reloaded and stuck with SP1 for over a year with little problems except for the annoying problem of MS constant reminder that I desperatley needed to upgrade to SP2 for security reasons. I would try and manually sort through the security updates and load each one without loading SP2, some worked, some didn't. Long story short, after ugrading from dialup to cable a few weeks ago and installingthe McAfee Suite, I decided to try SP2 again.... Same problems! If I weren't such a tight wade I'd throw this dell in the crapper and buy something new.
I now have a huge paper weight on my desk that won't let me even connect to the web, either through my cable modem or through my old dial up sevice that I kept for just such occassions. This leads me to the second question...... If SP2 is suppose to be necessary how the heck do I load it on this dell without these huge crash problems?
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