• Windows XP Service Pack 3 endless reboots

    Posted on May 8, 2008 at 17:47 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    Do you have an HP computer with an AMD processor?

    If so, and you have Windows XP’s Automatic Updates turned on, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

    Long-time Microsoft observer and MVP Jesper Johansson got bit:

    “Last night WSUS deployed XP Service Pack 3 to the sole remaining computer running XP that I have. This morning, I came down and was greeted with incessant reboots. The computer booted, apologized for not being able to boot properly, asked if I wanted to boot into safe mode, defaulted to normal boot, rebooted, and so on and so on.

    It would boot into safe mode fine, so I did that. Not knowing what it was, I ran a disk check, which turned out to be a real mistake. Once I configured the computer to run a disk check at startup it would not even boot into safe mode.

    Fortunately, I know Bill Castner, another Microsoft MVP, and he pointed me to a solution. It turns out that this computer is running an OEM OS image from HP. HP, apparently along other OEMs, deploy the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers. That means they all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality.

    Ordinarily, having intelppm.sys running appears to cause no problems. However, on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes a big problem. The computer either fails to boot, as in my case, or crashes with a STOP error code of 0x0000007e. It will boot into safe mode because the drivers are disabled there.

    I repeat: turn off Automatic Updates. There’s no compelling reason to install WinXP Service Pack 3 just yet. Yes, you should install Microsoft’s other security patches and updates (although I remain lukewarm about Vista Service Pack 1). But leave WinXP SP3 alone for now.

    Windows Patches/Security
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