Why the Windows XP install/restore experience I've just had sucked

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/begging for sympathy

 

I briefly mentioned this in my Windows Update thread. I hope anyone who's going to be making installers reads this and takes note ;)

 

 

 

Why the Windows XP install/restore experience I've just had sucked

 

Recently, due to hard drive corruption, I had to reinstall Windows XP. In my box I have two hard drives - one running XP the other (was) running Server 2003. The XP install had broken and wasn't even booting in safe mode, so I booted into Server 2003 to try and troubleshoot the problem. The fact that this was booting fine pointed away from any hardware issues with the system and mean something had gone wrong with the XP install. I hadn't modified any software, but it's possible some of my family had. So I opened the system logs from the XP system in Event Viewer and noticed a whole load of weird stuff (a plethora of "anonymous login" events, usernames replaced with strings of letters and numbers, the systematic failure of the "DCOM" service to start every few seconds or so and something adding a whole load of exceptions to Windows Firewall (which I wasn't even using) some of which should already have been added). Normally I'd put these symptons down to a virus, but there was a third event which caught my eye. In the "System" section of the log was an event relating to "disk" which was reporting errors paging files (Windows help recomended using a different disk as the main system disk if this error occured regularly) so I put the whole thing down the disc corruption - it would make sense that would cause several of these problems.

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So I used the Server 2003 installation to perform*a CHKDSK on the XP drive. This found and repaired many errors and - lo and behold - the drive was now bootable again. However there were many problems with it - CHKDSK had had to replace all the security IDs on all the files resulting in most of my programmes complaining that they didn't have the required permision to do stuff, the start menu was behaving badly and most of the administrative stuff (like services.msc) were completely broken. I tried to run a system restore but that too was broken.

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At this point I decided that I'd stick the XP restore disk in and hoped that that would either allow me to boot off hdd with CD support or, at least, do a repair install - without formatting. So I put the CD in. Next thing I see is "Copying Windows XP setup files." I wait for this and all of a sudden it says "Formatting 38000mb volume." I'm just like "what the heck?" I'd expected it to at least give me some options - repair, formatt and reinstall. At the very least it should have said "this is what I will do, Yes or Cancel?" Fortunately I was saved by the fact that I broke my one golden rule of OS installing - unplug all other drives. This meant it wiped the Server 2003 drive which didn't have any user files on it. If it had wiped the 250000mb volume that had xp on it I would have lost an awful lot of files - my important ones were backed up, but the same cannot be said for other family members.

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So there you have it - I had a close brush with formatt and a bad install experience. If anyone from my OEM (Novatech) is reading this - please make sure your restore disks don't do this again.

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I really notice the difference between running on a SATA II drive and an IDE drive too. My system, although faster now, seems less responsive for disk accessing tasks than it used to.

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Also, can anyone tell me whether the corect spelling is disc or disk? :p

 

Directly Cross posted from my blog.

 

 

 

 

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