Jesper's Blog - All Comments

re: Anatomy of a Hack 2008

Marco — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:23:08 GMT

Great! Good news: Jesper back on TechEd! Would be great if you would do a session with Steve Riley.

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Wintel user — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:09:18 GMT

Thanks for the great tips, my old hp finally boots up now!

Maybe you should distinguish a section for those who installed sp3 already and didn't fix it before hand.

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Fred — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:16:28 GMT

Sorry to have another message. I do want to solve the issue here. I now connected the hdd, from this system which was affected by SP3, via usb to another computer. At first I could not access the main windows partition (ntfs), so had to do a chkdsk. Probably wrong, but I fealt I had no options. Wow, he was doing a lot, I opted /F/V/X and so, thus he found a lot of issues.

Now I can access the partition which contains the windows environment. Is there a way I can solve it here, meaning... can I copy systemfiles from my computer's hdd to the affected hdd so it will boot up again and maybe (hopefully) work normally ? Or isn't that possible at all. What can be done. My previous message doe not show up yet, so I guess you are busy. Hope you can help me soon enough, cause people need this pc back in order to be able to use it again.

Somewhat I feel it is not right to have consumers having to deal with these problems due to maybe a wrong SP3 pack or mistakes from systemproviders. Blaming each other does not help to prevent people to have these problems.

That said, hope you can help me out here. Thanks!

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Fred — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:35:22 GMT

Allright. AMD-PC. Installed xp sp3 via automatic updates. However, being aware of virusscanners being able to disturb this update, I disabled that. After the update the system does not boot anymore. I get nothing on the screen. There are some sounds on the motherboard (about 8 times... sounds like on-off) and then the cmos-biep comes around. Keyboard reacts, the cd-rom-player reacts, but nothing happens. The system restarts after that procedure and I can't do nothing at all.

So. No way I can do a system restore, no way I can get into the registry. How is this to be solved ??

Hope you also have an answer to this Jesper. Thanks in advance !

Endless reboot loop

Jkawa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:29:59 GMT

My computer goes into the endless reboot loop, it offers me the safe boot mode but I cannot arrow to it. I tried pressing F8 but that does not work. I have and ATI 9800 video card and SP3 so I think that is the problem. I tried putting in my XP CD but it keeps going in the loop. Any answers?

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Mark Condiotte allegra@comcast.net — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:23:07 GMT

I have my computers set to receive automatic updates from Microsoft. Usually I just allow an express install and I do not look at the download. I have just trusted Microsoft. Last week I happened to look at the download before installing it. When it read "Service Pack 3", I remembered all the hub-bub about Service Pack 2 but figured I would have heard about it on the news if it was a problem, so I just allowed an install. The next time I opened up the drive I got the 'blue screen of death' and the computer tried to reboot but would not and it tried instead to run checkdisk. Instead of checkdisk running it flashed a blue screen reporting that my MFT file was corrupted. I then opened up my second hard drive, which is my backup, and had also just loaded service pack 3. Checkdsk ran and immediately started deleting corrupt files. I placed the hard disks in another computer as slaves and it turns out that it deleted 140 gig of data on one ant the other cant be read without the MTF file.

Apparently service pack 3 has problems with AMD processors and according to one Microsoft tech some adobe products. Both of which I used with the drives. I'm working on it with a microsoft tech (research team) but it looks like some substantial portion of my data (close to all of it) will be unrecoverable. None of the standard fixes have seemed to help. Recovery console can not read any directory.

Can you help me???

hp pavillion ze1230 laptop AMD Athlon XP

Chris — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:02:37 GMT

Hi Jesper,

You are doing great work. My problem seems like a variant of the SP3/HP/AMD issue. machine is a hp pavillion ze1230 laptop AMD Athlon XP 1.3G. the 3 issues are: 1. all Firefox bookmarks were deleted, 2. laptop fails to boot on 1st try, but is always successful on 2nd try. 3. laptop will freeze with no warning - typically after 30-60 min. mouse doesn't move, etc. must hit power button to reboot. I am not having repeated reboot issue. I did do a System Restore to a date prior to the SP3 update which I think helped the freezing problem a little, but honestly can't remember. thanks in advance for your help.

Chris

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

nathan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:32:52 GMT

i have a hp winxp mce 2002 service pack 2, amd athlon64 3400+, and an ati video card. i noticed the malicous spyware removal tool from ms in my updates and didnt install it for the longest time cus i didnt like the name. the other day i installed it, i think it was the august malicous spyware tool. it was the only update that was installed. my computer crashed and was stuck in the endless reboots. i didnt know what to do so i used hp system recovery to get it running, and then i installed sp3, which i think has the same malicous spyware tool in it, and got to the same endless rebott cycle. so i finally did a complete format and reinstall xp. i now have sp2 and am not sure i should install sp3 since i have an amd, mce 2002, and ati video card. i just dont want to go thru all the hasel again, but i want to keep my computer safe and updated. any advice on what to do would be helpful. thx

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Gis Bun — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:01:31 GMT

Matt M: Check the Dell site for updated drivers. In the tread above [and it may apply to yours] some wireless cards with a certain chip hail with SP3. In a general rule, make sure your system drivers are current before a SP upgrade.

MichaelN & Others: If you don't want SP3, add the following in your registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]

"DoNotAllowSP"=dword:00000001

This came from the Windows Service Pack Blocker kit from Microsoft. For the next 6-8 months it will block SP3 from installing.

Alternative would be to stop Automatic Updates completely and manually do them yourself after every patch Tuesday [note that it may list SP3, make sure you don't choose it].

Note that SP2 will stop being supported in early 2010. So by then you either accept it or switch to Vista/Windows 7. As well, when you finally end up installing SP3, you will need to install virtually every security update since SP3 came out.

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

MichaelN — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:23:37 GMT

So, XP randomly decided to download service pack 3 while I was away from my keyboard, and not knowing, I rebooted my PC sometime later and now I'm stuck in a rebooting loop. I'm posting this from safe mode.

The only reason why I got safe mode to work was because I got into the boot bios or whatever by pressing F8 before windows loaded and took "autorestart after crash" or whatever. But again, if I restart, it puts me in the loop, and won't let me in my normal PC.

SO. Here's what I've done:

I put in my xp cd and ran the repair thing, and it didn't do ***. I ran 3 different scans and it can't find anything wrong. I've read this really helpful blog about this problem, but a lot of the fixes don't apply to my pc since I built it myself. Like, it says to go to regedit, then go to a certain folder and change a certain file's value, but I don't have it. at all. Instead of intelppm, I seem to only have intelide, which is something totally unrelated.

I've restarted my PC without any USB connections, and I've totally uninstalled SP3.

It's 2:20 am and I am mentally exhausted at this point, I've been working on this for about 12 hours now. So if there is anything any of you can come up with, I would really appreciate it.

Oh, I'm running my PC on a AMD Athlon 64 4000+

if anyone wants to email me, my address is mikenorris2137@hotmail.com

re: Anatomy of a Hack 2008

Andy Dowling — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:38:21 GMT

Thanks for the rundown - I've seen a few systems affected by this lately. We've found it also infects removable media with a setup.exe and autorun.inf, to spread to other PCs in the old-school way.

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

dave — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:02:18 GMT

i have a AMD based board and i am having this error.

The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant

i tryed the USB drive, as well as removing the USB mouse.

any other idea`s? this is the second time this has happend, both times on SP3. last time i rebuilt it, but i would rather not do that.

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Ben — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:55:48 GMT

My update with SP3 on XP failed. It's a Leadtek Winfast board with AMD processor. After the installation, the video wasn't displayed. I managed to boot in safe mode and restore to an earlier checkpoint. However, I now find that the machine seems rather slower than it was pre-update. Unfortunate!

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

Matt M — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:43:52 GMT

Great...mine booted but there's no internet and I blue-screen every time wireless tries to scan for new networks... (Dell Truemobile mPCI 1300)

My neighbor has a Cox USB cable modem which wouldn't work after SP3 and lost everything when GeekSquad reinstalled Windows to fix the problem...

Stay away from SP3!!!!!!!!

re: Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3?

michael loceff — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:22:19 GMT

I found this blog, ,thankfully, before I did any damage, and the USB storgage device fixed the problem.

Hardware: ASUS A8N32SLI with AMD processor.

Update: SP3

Symptom, could not reboot, even in safe mode. Got prompt with choices but when windows started it's first screen, it blinked off after about 1 or 2 second and started over at BIOS level with a new reboot.

Solution: Inserted a USB flash memory card in a slot.

I can't believe that anyone figured this out, nor that I found it so quickly - I was about to rebuild my system.

Thank you so very much!