I have been trying to restore an HP desktop system for my sister in law in time for Christmas. One may argue that fixing someone's property and giving it back to them is not a present; I invite you to take on this nasty beast.

I have been trying to restore the factory image, reload all the windows updates and put some software back on. I've done this with maybe 100 PC's and built close to 500 from the case up.

Restoring the image seems simple. The three discs are read and all is happy. It boots up. You name it.

Bill Gates and the folks at HP are snickering, because that is where the fun ends.

I am on he third reformat of a brand new hard drive. Everything is cool until I start running Windows update. I know better than to load 15 updates at a time. I do them in smaller groups and they succeed.

Then comes service pack 1. It should be specified as a solo update but is not. I know to solo update solo. It fails anyway. I then tell it to search for updates again and it never comes home. SP1 seems to screw all kinds of permissions up making it a ****ing dos-based chore to unscrew whatever it did--which seems to be irreproduceable. Last time it took part of my admin permissions away so I can't fix it without getting down and dirty.

Just reloaded the **** 3 disc factory image for round 3 tomorrow.
With my luck it's corrupt from the start.

OK, now I can go to bed

 

Aren't you supposed to activate windows before any service pack can be installed, from using the windows update version?

I usually download the service pack separate and burn it to a CD.

 

Windows was/is activated prior to SP1 installation attempt

 

oh joy, the .NET v4 client installed on my machine as part of the service pack was messed up. I found that fix on the internet which was short n sweet.

Now only 238 windows updates to go (no joke)

Hey, 1 just failed (ha HA)!

wish me fun and excitement as I apply the patches in groups of 10 or 20