Computers can be evil, yes they can
Grrrrrrr computer troubles (car troubles, too lol, double whammy!) ...
So my main hard drive was failing, so I went and picked up a brand new one to replace it and after hours of recovering and backing up data from the old drive to a storage drive I installed my brand new treasure.
Had a little trouble booting from CD since for some reason the cd rom wasn't recognized in the secondary IDE slot, so I switched it to the primary (had an IDE hard drive there previously) and began formatting and started a nice clean XP install.
So far so good, installed some drivers and then thought it would be a good idea to do windows updates, um yeah…
First couple went just fine then when it came to service pack 2, it didn't go so well, it crashed my whole system and sent me into an endless boot loop.
Apparently a known issue with older Prescott CPU's and out of date BIOS (which mine isn't …) as I am finding out now after the fact. bleh
Couldn't even boot into safe mode. Short of wiping the drive completely and starting over I booted from the CD into Recovery mode and manually removed the service pack via some command lines and was able to boot XP normal again.
Will update my BIOS tonight and hopefully figure out how to fix this damn problem.
I hope I don't have to start over and reformat, that alone will be about 2 1/2 hours since it is a 1 TB drive.
Anyone have experience with this stupid Windows XP Service Pack 2/3 problem?
Oh and all that left me with about 2 1/2 hours of sleep lol
I could use a nap right now, but got a few more hours of work ahead of me…
/rant off