Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Vista: testing the waters; repair installs on XP SP2

This weekend, Ruth's laptop died. A refurb Dell Latitude D800 bought nearly six years ago, it refused to stay powered on Sunday night and I spent much of yesterday morning swapping the HD into my smaller, less powerful Latitude C610 and doing the Repair Install boogie to get it to work there.

This was a short term solution to allow her to continue working from home, and we needed a laptop for her that had a warranty and a future. Best Buy had a floor clearance model which we snapped up and they are in the process of stripping out the crapware and optimizing it for her -- and it runs Vista. We'll see how this goes.

The other point to this blog entry is a piece of advice for people who have to do repair installs on XP SP2 (e.g. you're transplanting a boot drive into a new PC): if you've installed IE7, you're going to have problems with Microsoft Update after the repair install. Windows Update/Microsoft Update depend on a working version of IE, and the standard repair install will hose IE by partially replacing it with IE6 but not to the point of actually working. MS recommends uninstalling IE7 before doing the repair install, but honestly if you have to do a repair install chances are you can't do that.

Do the standard repair install procedure. After it's done and the system reboots to the point that you can use the desktop, open Firefox/Opera and go to the Microsoft site to download the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers. Run it and let it install all of SP2. Sit and watch it, it has some prompts. Reboot when it asks you to.

At this point you still don't have a viable IE, so go back to the Microsoft site and grab the IE7 installer. Run it and reboot.

At this point you'll have a working instance of IE and therefore Windows Update/Microsoft Update will work (and then it will need to install all the patches that came out after SP2). After this you should have a working XP SP2.

In our case there was another step: Office quietly detected that the hardware had changed since it was last run (remember, the HD was swapped into another PC) and it demanded the Office install CD to be happy. We did and all was good.