Install of SP2 failed; now XP won't boot

C

CharlesM

Bit poster
I'm using a MacBook Pro 13". Running Snow Leopard, latest edition. Running Parallels latest edition. 4gig of RAM. Parallels on Auto had 3 gig available. Windows was set to 512MB. 320gig internal drive, with 150+gig free. About the same size external FW400 TimeMachine external drive.

Been using this computer for only one week.

My #1 client wanted me to have Windows for web tests. I bought Parallels. They installed Windows XP Pro yesterday. Without, I believe, any of the service packs. All ran fine. Then Windows told me there were recommended updates. Then Office told me that Service Pack 2 was needed to run it. OK, I thought, let's do it.

Windows suggested and I installed something with a name like Microsoft Update. That looked at my Windows and suggested Service Pack 2. Go ahead, I clicked.

The first install failed with a message of approximately "memory 0000000XXX not found". Windows still worked. Tried again. That try failed with a message that data was not valid. And that Windows might be damaged. It was.Trying to start Windows results in a loop of try, fail, try, fail, etc.

I will now open TimeMachine Help for the first time. See if I can take Parallels back to a time when Windows worked. (The option in Parallels to exclude from TimeMachine is NOT selected.)

But whether TimeMachine gives me Windows back, or whether I have to wait until next week when my client's shop can reinstall Windows XP Pro, I decided I needed to ask here IF and HOW Windows can be upgraded to the latest or best-for-Parallels version of XP.

Thank you.
 
My first attempt with Time Machine showed some promise. Windows XP got farther in booting, and then tried to fix itself, but wasn't able to.

I've gone back a bit further time-wise, and will try again. Thought I'd add to this thread now just in case anyone is watching before leaving for the weekend. (Lucky you. I'm working.)

My latest untried restore went back to slightly older copies of two apps and one folder. Parallels and Parallels Desktop in Applications. And user > Documents > Parallels (containing "Windows XP.pvm" a file of about 2gigs).

I don't know if there are other files that also should be swapped out for older ones.

If this works, and I get Windows XP back, my main question probably remains: Will Parallels be happy if I upgrade to Service Pack 2 (since my tries using Microsoft Update were ill-fated). And what's the right way to install SP2?

Thanks for reading...
 
Going back to a TimeMachine back up one hour older, and restoring the 2 apps and 1 folder detailed in my 2nd message WORKED. I'm writing this in IE within Windows XP.

Just need to find out how to upgrade to Service Pack 2 without repeating all this trouble.
 
Now that I know about Snapshots these upgrade failures are less irksome. This time Microsoft Update did two rounds of updates successfully (well, actually it did the same last time too). Then it attempted to install Service Pack 2, worked for quite a while, stopped and reported that the data was not valid. Then it tried for another while and failed to undue the update, and hung. That's when I reverted to the last snapshot.

That's two times that Service Pack 2 failed.

Might Service Pack 2 be incompatible with Parallels 4? Is there a reason that Microsoft Update might not handle SP2 inside Parallels?

Neither seem very likely. Is there an alternative strategy I can try?
 
This should be my 4th or 5th post - but I may have used reply incorrectly for the others.

Before my 4th attempt to install Service Pack 2, I held down the F8 key while restarting Windows XP. I guess that starts in Safe mode, but I saw no mention of that.

For that or other reason, SP2 finally installed without crashing at invalid data.

After that, I successfully installed the 60-day Office Pro trial. Things are good.

After the second SP2 install failed, Windows was broken and couldn't boot. I used TimeMachine to revert to older backups (Parallels and Parallels Desktop in Apps; Parallels in user> Documents). That worked well enough. But the real solution was to learn to use Snapshot in Parallels. That does a smart restore.

Kaspersky virus kept complaining about its blacklist. Kas. Update didn't seem to fix it but the complaints went away after a restart of Windows.

The Parallels User Guide is 250+ pages, but searching found no mention of Service Packs. And the only finds for "update" were to update Parallels itself. I'm surprised they don't cover updating Windows. I found the F8 tip through a Google. I tend to believe it should be in the users guide.
 
Similar problem on MacBook Pro, P. Dsktp 4.0

My XP continues to work but after each failed SP2 update I get prompted to uninstall SP2 for it is "unstable".

I tried to update SP 2 in Safe Mode with networking but that didn't work either.
I always get the Application Error for update.exe with the message "The instruction at "0x77blahblah referenced memory at 0x0000000. The memory could not be read".

I used the Wizard to create this VM with default settings so the configuration shouldn't be an issue.

So finally I deleted the VM and reinstalled an XP VM using the more manual way of choosing the OS for the new VM and inserting the disk when prompted. Install worked fine but the same problem occurred when doing the SP2 update.

I'm using Mac OS X Version 10.5.8 on a MacBook Pro and Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac.

Any ideas Parallels Team?
 
work-around: install SP1

Mark,
I finally had to do updates through the "custom" method and I just kept selecting any and all updates EXCEPT for SP2. This eventually led me to successfully install SP1. After that I continued to do the updates until only SP2 was the only one not installed. Then I installed SP2 successfully.
Definitely not a pleasant experience.

My MacBook Pro is new with very little on it and when I run the XP VM in Parallels it is... not as speedy as one would expect.

We've decided to try out VMWare Fusion - a more expensive solution but perhaps necessary.

Skippy
 
Mark,

After 5 days of frustration with 10 reloads of XP, I followed SkippyV's advice and did what he suggested.

It seems that if you go for one big Service Pack 2 update, it'll crash your OS and corrupt the program, causing you to delete and reload XP from scratch.

I did the update bit by bit by using the "custom" route and did SP-1 first. Then SP-2 updated without any problems. From there, SP-3 loaded without a hitch.

ED
 
Chronic Issue with XP Service Pack 2 Upgrade

Before I found this thread, I found this one:http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=8888

I had tried twice to install XP;- which worked both times unitl I tried to install SP2 upgrade;- then it failed both times. I had used the default settings in the VM assistant for XP pro, 1 Processor, 1 G. RAM, installed to user/shared/parallels and checked folders not shared. Both attempts produced a memory read error. The first attempt Windows successfully reverted to XP pro, second time the program crashed. I had not made a snapshot and tried to revert the Parallels folder with time machine which produced a bootable XP but with many error and corruption messages.

So I trashed it all, search google and found the link above, reduced the RAM to 768 during VM creation, installed XP, turned off the network device, and then ran the SP2 upgrade (this was a downloaded from a third party, soft32.com). This time it worked fine all the way through. I then got really confident and went for SP3, which also worked fine;- then Internet Explorer 8, so far so good. This thread needs to be a sticky on XP pro. Obviously there is something not cool with the default settings that the VM assistant comes up with. It probably works fine for some versions of XP. It might work fine if you are using the Parallels transporter. But 1 G. of RAM doesn't work if you need to install SP2 over XP pro. It may be the network device also. I will attempt another install with 1G. and then just turn off the network device.

Machine Configuration: iMac 3.33 GHz. IC2D, 8G. RAM with Snow Leopard 10.6.2
 
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