Question
-
Topic
-
weird winders update problem . . .
Locked– Friend brought me his ailing HP Media Center m8300f
– I said the only way to restore it is to order the recovery media from HP, as I don’t have an OEM system builder copy of vista home prem.
and it’s cheaper to pay HP the $42.00 than to go hunting for an OEM system builder disc.
– DBAN’d both 320GB HDDs in the unit and it ran with no problems for the 20+ hours for each HDD wipe
– installed via the recovery media
– all works fine
– removed the trialware of norton or mcbloat (don’t recall it was quite a while ago) and installed MSE
– tried getting updates from winder update
– ran fine until close to the end of the batch of updates (I install updates individually never in bulk)
– last few updates hosed the system don’t know which ones because the system wouldn’t start
– system would boot to password and before fully loading the desktop, boom it shuts off
– every attempt to start the system only made things worse as it would shut off sooner until it wouldn’t even display the login dialog before it shut down– restored from the recovery partition
– second time around starting over from the recovery partition restore
– tested the disk with both SpinRite and Seatools (NPF)
– tested the RAM with the RAM Abuser from the windows online crash analysis page (NPF)
– MS is weird, they won’t offer the SP until all updates are installed,
(why then are “all previous updates included in the SP if I can’t have the SP from winders update until all previous updates are installed)
– anyhoo, while the system was rebuilding from the recovery partition, downloaded the network installers for both SP1 and SP2, since vista SPs don’t have the previous SP included, both are required,
unlike XP or Win2K where the previous SPs aren’t necessary, an RTM win2k can go directly to SP4, and an RTM XP can go directly to SP3
– got the SPs installed, and the system runs fine
– start doing the updates and boom, back to unexpected shutdowns again
this time I only had 2 updates done
– > – KB961501
– > – KB970238
– both dated 9/June/2009, which are the first updates offered from the first crash Tuesday following the May SP2 release– I can’t return the system without finishing the updates
– but I can’t get it to update either
– restored it again and runs fine at SP2 and no post SP2 updates– any ideas to what is bombing the system when I start updating, or what to do about it?
– it’s currently running another disk test, (this time @L4 which is 20+hours / disk)