What's the recommended way to recover from a failed Windows Update on XP?
Last Friday night I started a Windows Update running, went over to the TV
and fell asleep. Saturday morning I found an illegal operation message
window with a send/don't send option. I opted for don't send and was
presented with the "Windows Update needs to reboot message boxes". I
rebooted and got a "\Windows\System32\ntoskrnl.exe is missing or
corrupted". I couldn't even get to the point of starting in safe mode. I
ended up pulling the hard drive, attaching it to my laptop via a USB
cable, copying in the ntoskrnl.exe from it. Before I attempted booting I
added more memory to the PC since the case was open. I was able to boot
but Windows said that it needed to re-authenticate. Fine. It booted but
got into a cycle of displaying a continually displaying a message box that
"Explorer has performed an illegal operation". I was able to boot into
safe mode and revert to a checkpoint before I ever started the Windows
Update. Everything booted fine but the sound wasn't working and although
IP things such as browser and e-mail worked browsing the Windows network
wasn't there. When I try Windows Update it gets me back to the cycle of
"Explorer has performed an illegal operation" messages which requires me
to revert back to the earlier checkpoint.
I'm going to have another attempt this weekend. Does anybody have any
ideas/advice? I've done some searching on identifying and fixing errors.
A lot of links point to a product called Reg Cure
http://www.regcure.com/
Has anybody had any experience with this? It scans for free but you have
to buy it to fix anything.
Dave Parnin
midrange.com
