Service Packs and Updates keeping us in bacon

To apply, or not to apply.

Until this week, I have been advocating customers to apply any and all Microsoft updates that are available.

I was surprised (but not shocked), that a routine SP1 on Vista Home Basic went up the creek.

I was also surprised that more of a fuss had not been made of it at the time (mid 2008). Judging by the number of similar reports, it was obviously a widespread problem.

In summary, if SP1 was applied whilst the antivirus was not disabled, the file $TxfLog was corrupted and Windows simply got into a reboot loop.

Booting to Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 did it for me), mounting the drive using the third generation ntfs-3g allowed me to delete the file.  Bingo.  Fixed.

(Most posts point back to http://www.delmartian.com/workaround-for-stop-0x0000c1f5-0xc1f5-c1f5-bsod-clfssys-kb946084.html so kudos there.)

Problem solved? You'd think.

Up till then I didn't know which update had been the cause, so I ran SP1.

This time I came up with another unusable Vista system, telling me usefully:

!! 0xc0000034 !! 250/53007 (_0000000000000000.cdf-ms)

Fortunately, this too was fairly simply resolved using a Vista Recovery Disc and going back to the last Restore Point, summarised well here: http://ezinearticles.com/?Error:-0xc0000034-While-Installing-Windows-Vista-SP1-Or-SP2&id=2580302

OOPS, spoke too soon, restore shows the point that I wanted (immediately prior to SP1), but never completes.

I ended up backing up (via F11 and saving to a USB disk) and reinstalling ("recovering").

A few things occur to me.

1 How did we fix these sorts of things before we could search (and find) the exact error message, and find multiple hits and usually a solution, or at least a hint which direction to go, thus saving hours of trial and error in getting it fixed.

2 Does Microsoft specifically say that we need to disable antimalware when applying major (or even minor) patches? They probably do somewhere in the never-read "I agree" screens...

3 A new refreshed OS is a good idea occasionally, but only when I choose it, and not on a customer's beloved tweaked and data-laden dust-collector.

4 Restore points are REALLY useful, and we should use them more routinely. (Perhaps we are guilty of jumping to conclusions that fixes should be harder than that, whereas we should be covering off the simplest, built-in methods first).

5 In Vista there are a lot more built-in options to try and fix things at boot time, but the terminology is obtuse and each of the methods seems to confuse the matter further!

For a good run down of the Vista recovery process, see http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

And lastly, a knowledge of Linux is absolutely essentials these days to fix Windows!