I’m in XP hell

After dinner, Breck let me know that his computer crashed while online today, and now it won’t boot. He wasn’t kidding. It wouldn’t even boot into safe mode. Luckily, I still have the install CD, so I tried a repair install. It failed. So then I booted from CD into the recovery console and ran chkdsk. It found some disk errors. After that, I was able to complete the repair install, although I got about a dozen file not found errors during the process. Somewhat surprisingly, the computer booted after that. Not surprisingly, I had no wireless. My XP CD is an original, pre SP1. I don’t think XP had wireless back then. So I hauled everything up to the living room so I could plug into the router to get network access. That accomplished, I tried to run MS update. It crashed several times. I’m guessing XP gold can’t handle the current MS web site? Anyway, I found a way around that and was able to use Firefox to download an ISO of SP3. When I went to install that I got an error that I needed SP1 first. I guess when SP3 says “includes all previous updates” it means something different than what I took ALL to mean. Fucking Microsoft. So here I sit watching SP1 install. Then I imagine I’ll need to reboot, then install SP3, then reboot. Hopefully that will be it. Hopefully.

I have no idea what could have happened online to hose XP this bad. We are firewalled and anti-virused out the wazoo, so I don’t think anything malicious could have made it past my defenses. However, I think sometime in the very near future I’m going to set up his computer to dual boot XP Ubuntu and teach him to do all his online work in Linux and save XP for gaming only.

Update: After the SP1 install I lost all USB. Thinking maybe something came loose when I moved the computer near the router I opened it up and checked all the motherboard connections. Everything looked fine. When I rebooted I still had no USB, and none of the lights on the front of the PC worked. I was able to use the keyboard to navigate enough to get the SP3 install going, and then I checked the connections again. The LED jumpers looked fine, and the same connection powers the power and reset switch, both of which work fine. So I don’t know… After the SP3 install and reboot, I deleted all the USB drivers, and on the reinstall of those USB came back to life. So all seems to be fine, except the pretty lights on the front of the case.

I went to bed at 2 AM. If your wondering why I stayed up so late working on this, it’s because I got more sleep this way. If I had gone to bed at a normal time I would have laid awake all night thinking about things to try with the computer. I simply would not be able to sleep until I had either fixed it, or was convinced it was unfixable.