Only slightly posed

Sailor's getting into the hang of the whole park bench sitting thing.

Please Wait

I declared data bankruptcy last week, giving up my attempts to restore a 2004-era IBM Thinkpad x31 with Windows XP to some semblance of a running state. Truth be told, I was holding out a little hope that the Microsoft Windows XP SP2 CD I'd ordered would magically restore everything.

Bzzt.

The backstory is this: Windows has some sort of "recovery" feature where you can have the Windows installer zip through and fix up an installation. I have two Windows XP CDs and was using one of those CDs to attempt the repair job. After the initial repair install was laid down, the system would reboot and after a few minutes of spinning, ask for asms from the Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD. This was a dead stop, it wouldn't continue onwards. So, I ordered the Windows XP SP2 CD for USD$3.something in shipping costs.

It arrived Monday and I went to work with it last night. I mean, while I have written off the system, it would be nice to get it to boot one last time so I can clean up permissions, unencrypt some stuff which may or may not be decryptable on the new system, and generally muck around for reasons I can't quite elucidate.

I restarted the process, it asked for the SP2 CD which I put into the drive.

I click "Ok".

The system asks for the Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD. I am somewhat concerned.

I shut down, and boot up the bland Windows XP installation which is on the same system and check out the CD. While the CD has the Windows XP Service Pack 2 on it, the service pack is in a zip file and is not in the normal Windows installation directory. I unzip the file into c:\SP2 and reboot.

On rebooting the system again asks for asms, I dutifully point it to c:\sp2\i386 and it happily moves on.

It stops again, this time asking for NT5INF.CAT from the Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD. I'm puzzled though since I already pointed it to the service pack files, or so I thought. I punch in the directory and… no joy. Again it asks for NT5INF.CAT from Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD.

You may have noticed that I keep repeating Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD. This is not some lame attempt at Google Juice but a reminder that the problem could be staring me (you) right in the face and I'll blithely ignore it.

It occurs to me to take a look at the CD I've been using for the recovery installation. Interestingly, it is titled Windows XP Professional SP2 Installation CD. I did not need to order the service pack CD from Microsoft after all, I'd had it here all along.

Except, of course, the system doesn't think that asms, NT5INF.CAT and about 10,000 other files are not on the CD.

I boot over into the other image again to take a close look at the CD.

Interestingly, I find the asms package, the NT5INF.CAT file and 9,998 other files the system had been complaining it could not find.

I invoke the google and dig around.

Turns out that Microsoft Windows XP Professional has a slight problem in that when installing from CD, it can forget about the CD and lose the ability to read from the CD. Ooops, sorry, why don't you consider upgrading to Microsoft Vista?

I should add that I remained mostly calm through most of this, only dragging the dogs out for a walk once. No computers went flying, no displays sent crashing, no mice squealing.

So, I muck around a bit and discover I can get a command shell while in the midst of the recovery installation GUI and use that to see what drives I can actually see. I discover that the GUI which has lost the ability to read the CD can still read the 5Gb CF card which has been sitting in the CD slot. I reboot again to the other installation and proceed to copy the \i386 tree to the CF card.

On completion of that, I reboot again (this was getting to be like installing OS/2 on a Model-80 in the 1990s). The system comes up with the now familiar request for asms, nt5inf.cat and so forth. I point all requests off to the CF card and it runs. Runs, runs, runs. Runs happily.

Then I get to the dreaded request for the Microsoft XP Professional product key. This is on the obverse side of the system which I pry out of the dock and manage to enter in. Correctly.

However, that product key is for an OEM install, not a CD install, and is therefore useless. I can only use the OEM key if I invoke the mystery recovery process which includes wiping out my system entirely.

No worries, I use the product key from the CD packaging. I'm not worried about activating the system, I just want the damn thing to boot. Once.

The system purrs on, happily copying files off the CF card, until it stops.

There's a collection of files which I won't enumerate having to do with the Out-of-box experience, which of course is different between the CD and OEM installs. The installer complains that it cannot copy these files, any of them, but allows me to escape and ignore the error and continue on with the recovery install.

I hold my hand down on the Esc key for awhile.

Finally the system says it's done and can be rebooted.

It reboots and I'm greeted with the now really too familiar Windows logo screen, with the message "Please wait…"