Saturday, March 18, 2006

Reinstalling Windows Adventure

The past week has been an endless effort to reinstall my windows system. For a few days I was looking for my bootable windows cd without any success. Then I burned a bootable cd and a bootable dvd but none of them worked. The reason? The reason was that my computer was set up in a way that it boots from the hard disk. So I had to change that setting in the BIOS. Thank god I still had the motherboard box around with some important manuals and cds inside, so I could read in there how to enter the BIOS World! There are two things in the computer that I fear the most : BIOS and the Registry of windows. Mistakes in them can prove fatal for the computer, although in the registry you can only mess your windows installation (which I have done!). I am not so sure how bad misconfiguration in the BIOS can be. Anyway, I had to enter the BIOS for the first time to change the sequence that the devices of the PC boot. I got great help from my friends at the antivir forum (amazing how these guys help) and I finally got to install windows! The installation was very quick, it only lasted 30 minutes and then I happily started to configure windows, change the settings, install drivers, programms etc. Until I installed the service pack 2. A disaster! The pc booted after the installation and could not open windows. I had no choice but to reinstall windows! Now I am downloading for the past 24 hours :P updates. I will create then an image of my system and try to install sp2 again in safe mode. No drivers installed yet but some programs. I hope it will work.

4 comments:

Indeterminacy said...

You're downloading those updates on a 56k modem, I think. That's awful! I'd recommend visiting a friend with dsl and doing those downloads all at once - that's how we do it when my in-laws visit me. They bring their laptop and hook up to our connection. Or isn't there an sp2 cd they make available? I hate to think of the Viruswitch subjected to endless windows downloads!

I had a problem once with booting from the installation cd because I had an automatic virus check in the boot options. I had to turn this off because it kept rejecting the windows boot.

I'm sure every person find some new exotic problem when they try to re-install windows.

admin said...

Well I have the sp2 in a cd just the rest of the updates I download per modem. It seemed that the updates were stuck. I installed windows for a third time with the correct order that people told me in antivir. That is:

-install windows
-install sp3
-install drivers
-install programs
-install updates

Well I didnt know the right order before. I also made an image of the fresh installation, but its just as you say it Indie. Exotic problems come with win installations! I now have a folder in a partition that cannot be deleted no matter what. :(

admin said...

sp2 of course :))

Indeterminacy said...

The thought of sp3 did make me shudder. I'm glad it was a typo.