Windows XP pro upgrade: ridiculously horrible
 

OK, I bought XP Pro upgrade version a few days ago, and now I have learned my lesson.

In attempting to upgrade a WinME box, the XP upgrade install behaved differently in the several times I attempted it.

At first it got partway through and died with some sort of talkback error after a "dynamic update" - intended, I guess, to correct whatever bugs MS felt necessary to correct after the OS went "gold". It suggested going again with another dynamic update.

The second time it claimed that it couldn't load a file on the CD, and failed with a bizarre error message, claiming that "upgrade functionality is disabled". The support page suggested copying the files from the CD to the hard drive and running setup from there. OK....

The third time it died with errors in user.exe.

The fourth time it got partly installed, after 30 dialogue boxes saying that it could not continue, along with only the OK button (i.e., no "cancel" - just like the examples in the user interface hall of shame). After hitting OK enough times, it appeared to resume the install, and died about 10 minutes in with a different error, after self-rebooting.

Now, it appears to be partly installed and in a state that it can't correct. On reboot, its boot manager gives a choice of booting XP or stopping the setup process. Choose to stop and it attempts an XP uninstall. But after 5 minutes of clunking away, theoretically uninstalling, it stops with a BSOD in "setupdd.sys".

It turns out that it would be cheaper to get by configuring an extra-cheap box from a system vendor and get the OS pre-installed. But please. Is nobody to upgrade? Is it not part of the MS revenue stream to see plenty of people putting up the latest and greatest?

And this box isn't anything non-standard, hardware wise. It's a P3-750 with 256 megs of memory, a Voodoo 3, two ide drives, a CDR, and a CDRW. And now it can't do anything, forever stuck halfway through the install.

Insanely, ridiculously horrible.

I had similar trouble with Linux way back in the day. It was September or October of 2000. I had a nice little box (syphon) and it was working fine. However, Red Hat 6.2 was out, and I thought I'd go ahead and make the jump. Afterall, I had successfully upgraded a 5.0 to 5.1, then 5.2, then 6.0, then 6.1. I was happy with Red Hat's upgrade process, which I assumed just did the equivalent of

rpm -Uvh *

and that was it.

Boy, was I wrong.

I installed and, sure enough, the installer finished. I was psyched. "Remove CD-ROM from drive and reboot." Wow. So I did.

You know how it does those lovely little [ OK ] or [FAILED] when it boots? Well, about <b>half</b> came up with [FAILED]. Shit.

No problem, right? I'll just fix 'em. Just let me get online here...

startx

After spewing some garbage to the terminal, it terminated. Shit. X is fucked too. I re-ran Xconfigurator. Same thing.

Uh.....

Okay. Well I'll just use lynx, browse the web and get the info to fix these problems <b>that</b> way, then go ahead and do it. I'll be up and running in an hour.

lynx http://www.google.com

Huh, not working?

ifconfig shows... loopback. That's all.

<b>SHIT!</b>

insmoding the module didn't work. Nothing did. The new kernel module it installed was broken.

Well, I weighed my options - I could restore the system to its old state by carefully working with everything on the system, massaging it just the right way to make it work - or I could rebuild. Well, with all my programs and shit installed, my choice was pretty much made for me - I'm not throwing away years of configuration just for a fuckin' Red Hat Upgrade.

I hand-downgraded all the necessary packages. I got the ethernet working, downloaded the latest kernel (2.2.16 I think it was, though I could be wrong), installed that, made sure ethernet still worked, and then spent another 4-6 hours (honestly, I lost track of time that night) getting everything working properly. I swore from then on, "I will hand-upgrade everything in this system." And that's what I've done.

Unfortunately, you can't really do that with windows the same way you can with UNIX. But you shouldn't be using Windows anyway. :) Buy a Mac. They just <b>work</b>. :)

Re: Windows XP pro upgrade: ridiculously horrible
 

Uhh, "Never use Microsoft Operating Systems!"?

Re: Windows XP pro upgrade: ridiculously horrible
 

Let's make sure of that!!

/me smacks Undertoad

There.

Don't get me started on XP etc. It'll give me indigestion as I eat my lunch. All I will contribute at this point is that I've always felt it's a very bad idea to upgrade an installation Windows. If you need to move to a newer version, start with a fresh hard drive & move your files over. But you probably know that :)

I only upgraded XP from 2000 here
 

I upgraded XP from 2000 here on a ThinkPad 770X (PII-300, 128MB RAM at time, 8 GB HD, Xircom Ethernet/Modem) and it went OK. Even Mediamatics DVD Express worked.

However, there were many issues with COM object registration, seeing how everything critical is a COM object in XP, and how there were a lot of internal dependencies that just sucked ass.

Gradually, the system degraded into a mess and I had to reformat the HD.

Plus, the IE used in XP/2K/NT and the one in 9X/Me are actually two different executables, each with their own suite of COM objects and own version of WININET.DLL (the main networking DLL for all happy TCP/IP functions in 9X/Me).

Since half the OS is based off of Internet Explorer DLL's, you're going to have some problems :(.

Bottom Line: NEVER upgrade a Win 9X system to XP or 2000. You will pay for it later. It will hate you.

If you don't want to format the HD, install XP into C:\WINNT51. After all, that is what it is!

Mitch

Another aspect of this is that vendors who pre-install will add about $140 to the price for XP Pro.

Let's see... mwave.com will quote $572 for a Duron 800 system (the cheapest setup you can buy) pre-loaded with XP Pro... or just the OS for $300. Hmmm, I don't think MS wants you to upgrade. I think they want you to just buy a whole new system.

With XP Pro, I think that's the case
 

They always price the Home and Professional editions of their OS this way. 98 always cost $199 on its own, and so did Me. NT cost $300, or $199 for an upgrade.

I'm afraid to see what .NET Advanced Server will run when it comes out.

Taking a guess? Not much ;)

mbpark,

If you know how to tell any edition of XP to install someplace other than C:\Windows, let me know. I certinaly didn't see it anywhere in the install.

UT,

But yeah, running an upgrade against an existing installation for ANY MS OS is just aching for trouble. Not to mention it leaves all of the collected cruft to cause more trouble.

Getting XP Pro for $140 (with a system, that is) isn't bad, assuming you get a CD. :)

Seeing as you're already sitting on the XP Pro upgrade disc, try to recover what data you can off of it and just wipe the partition.

The only real bonuses to XP over 2k for me are the pretty logins, visual styles, and hella faster booting.

I upgraded 98se to XP pro. It took me a few tries to get it working, but it finally did. Basically, I had to make sure that the installer DID NOT update the setup software/program at any time during the process. Whenever it did try to update the setup it would hang or reboot, or give me those wonderful little ms errors that say

blah blah blah read this to find out what's wrong:
000000000030300400x000r0f0004000f000x

or whathave you. like I'm supposed to know what the hell that means. anyways, after I actually got the installer to work, I didn't have any problems with XP, cept having to upgrade some drivers, and of course,
when I move the HD to a new machine, windows decided to completly fuck it over, and now I've got a thirty gig hard drive with all sorts of info on it that I can't get too, and I don't want to format it, in case I can actually get the data back. bastards.

we can get it. bring it down to me and i'll make it happen.

mbpark, while i havne't screwed with XP, judging by other ms software, copy it to the HD to install and look for an ini file, my guess it it will be in there as an enviroment variable.

Ive had my fare share of trouble going from 98 to 2k. Seems that the 2k kernel doesnt play nice on fat32 file systems, although it does support it. Good thing I had week-old cd's of everything important (game files, pictures, mp3s, pr0n, the important stuff). So I formatted and went with NTFS. Which brings me to my next point--why doesnt rh7.2 mount ntfs? Am I missing something?

Because it's a proprietary file system that Microsoft is less-than-willing to release the specs to.

Bah. Another instance of Micro$oft not playing nice. Go figure.

There's NTFS kernel drivers and tools available for linux here. I don't know if it's really a very closed format or if writing file system drivers is just really f'n difficult. I think that there's docs on MSDN detailing the various versions of the NTFS filesystem, but they may not be terribly useful.

They work. I use them at home. I've never tried mounting them read/write, because that apparently isn't done yet. You are strongly advised to run ntfsck after mounting an NTFS part r/w. I don't want my filesystems hosed. Someone else can do that. :)

verbatim, I've also noticed that 2k doesn't really play real nice with fat32 either. Or, it doesn't degrade nicely if anything crashes. Keep a 98 bootdisk handy with scandisk (or norton disk doctor) on it, you'll want to use it occasionally.

r/w is where you'll run into problems. RO works (AFAIK - I've never tried it 'cause I have no reason to), but a RO filesystem isn't particularly useful to me anyway :)

Of course, one could just get one of the various ext2 file system projects for Windows. :)

I personally have switched to ext3 on my main box now. fsck SUCKS! I'm glad I did too, because with the CPU/Linux problem that's happening right now, my system was crashing about once a day - hard freezing. Now it hasn't done it in a few days, which is good. Still, though...

Ideally, Microsoft should just open up their file system format for interoperability's sake.

<i>I don't know if it's really a very closed format or if writing file system drivers is just really f'n difficult.</i>

I'm voting A. A filesystem format should be very easy to decode, right? Typically you'd have fixed lengths for most of the data in the directory, and anyone would be able to compare the filesystem from point A to point B. Having a filesystem format that's strangely complicated only invites corruption as developers try to keep up with it.

I imagine that it's pretty wildly complex, considering the number and power of the features that are included in NTFS. After a 5 minute browse on MS's site, I could only find some general programming information (only slightly more useful than .h files). The linux-ntfs site has some pretty detailed docs though.

Reading data from NTFS wouldn't be too difficult, once you cracked the trick to reading the MFT and a some of the other uber-hidden files on an NTFS partition. Writing data back out that was actually consistent and didn't hose a dozen other things would probably be a nightmare though. There looks to be about half a dozen metadta files that have to be updated along with directory entries, the journal, and the file data itself. Most of these operations probably have to be atomic too. Then there's quotas, reparse points, compression, encryption, and all that cool shit that NTFS can do. Ugh.

Try http://www.systeminternals.com

If oyu have amix of NTFS/fat32 is is awful, butpure fat32 on all drives its fine

Been doing NT before there was FAT32. Let's get one thing straight right off. FAT32 was a last minute kludge created because Windows 9x would not die. It suffers from problems created in FAT12 and FAT16. NTFS tends to be faster in most applications, is so much more stable (and so SCANDISK is not required), has numerous redundancies, and for some reason even keeps correcting problems (without any intervention on my part) on a 4 Gig disk is dying a slow, horrible death.

The problem is that tony had ME. He is not the first to deal with this new Windows 9x series to Windows NT series upgrade. It is made more complex by the few kludge hardware designs that were optimized only for Win 9x.

For example, to use any NT systems on some Toshiba laptops only two years ago, you first had to upgrade the BIOS. One must visit they web support to learn about that problem.

We routinely assume that a processor that runs Windows 9x will also run other OSes. But Windows 9x uses less functions. For example, it uses none of the protection rings. Is that part of the processor functional? Most likely yes, but the point remains that Windows NT OSes require functions never 'tested' by a Windows 9x system. How functional is all that hardware?

Bottom line - get rid of FAT if not required. NTFS is the upgrade of the upgrade (HPFS) from FATxx.

Classic FAT problem - while writing to a disk, power is lost. What happens. To an NTFS filesystem, the new data is lost and drive data remains intact. To a FAT file system, the new data and the old disk data are both lost. What happens if that was the registry or a directory index? Too bad. Those are just some of the reasons why those with Windows 9x suffer failures. How many recognized the Windows 9x system that no longer booted as a FAT32 problem? How many even knew of this glaring FAT problem?

I have numerous systems with NTFS and a small FAT partition. No problem except on one drive that is failing. I can't write to the FAT partition. The NTFS partition just gets so slow to access as NTFS uses tricks to recover the data. Avoid FAT filesystems.

I know fat32 is fucking ugly, but i've tried both, and technicial aside, i'm sorry but it simply is faster.

NTFS support is mostly guessowrk under linux, and msft keep subtly changing it so its impossible to get it perfect. I had hell rescueing stuff off NTFS drives before.

ME btw is truely foul, and under no circumstnaces be put on anything, 98 is far better.

I looked at that site, where is NTFS stuff?
I tried win2k/NT infomation and source.

NTFS
 

What, no scandisk?

NTFS needs scandisk and defrag just as much as FAT32.

Why else would Microsoft do business with Scientologists to buy the code that defrags NTFS volumes (Executive Software Diskeeper) for 2000 and XP?

You can set Scandisk to run on 2000, NT, and XP at bootup, or if it's a non-system volume, at any time provided no services or apps are using the drive, if you want your data :).

However, you have to run them under 2000 and XP, and just as much as FAT32.

NTFS is an improvement on FAT32, however it's not XFS :)

It been over a year since I reviewed their NTFS discussions. Their knowledge of NTFS is why they also have created NTFS diskette software, NTFS access from DOS, etc. The details of their information were for sale and also discussed in a magazine. Background for NTFS may have since expired. Last time I looked, they had information on the filesystem upgrade of NTFS under NT 5.0. Of course NT 5.0 was not released yet - to date when I last reviewed their NTFS application notes.

Re: NTFS
 

Scandisk was later added to DOS because of FAT problems traceable to the filesystem structure. NT does not require Scandisk. On a rare occasion, NT may run Chkdsk. But common problems in FATxx such as damaged FAT tables are not common with NTFS.

You would think that FAT32 would have corrected these problems. No effort was made to correct any FAT weaknesses in FAT32 because FAT32 was only a kludge and temporary solution to a Windows 9x that would not die on schedule.

FATxx is so unreliable that damage to the start of a disk can destroy both copies of critical index tables - loss of all files. Again NTFS shines. It places redundant copies in separte locations.

FAT also has problems that make it slower in larger filesystems. For example, index tables located where head seeks will typically take longest. NTFS places those index tables near center of the drive so that file access is milliseconds quicker.

Defrag for NTFS exists in freeware in that systeminternals web site or from Executive Software. I said nothing about Defrag. I noted that FATxx is so unreliable that Scandisk with its too many repair procedures was essential.

Microsoft makes it clear. FATxx loses its advantages once a partition exceeds 300 Mb. A partition of 1 Gbyte is typically faster in NTFS as well as more reliable.

As I noted, I do use small FAT partitions on some systems where DOS also executes. One of those systems contains two MFM (40 Mb) hard drives. Remember them? By todays standards, they are loud.

tw, i think those utils (i looked at them, but not used) still use the internal drivers. I've accessed NTFS under linuxmyself, but its not an open system by a long shot. Mandrake does it out of the box, it was the only way i managed to rescue my box.

sysinternals tools
 

Mark Russinovich (probably the best NT mind out there today) wrote them.

They do have one that allows you to recover an NT box over a serial line, and Win9x drivers for NTFS :).

There's even ext2fs drivers for Win9x/2K/NT.

However, you've GOT to defrag NTFS drives every so often. Take it from someone who runs database servers. Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server need to get defragged a LOT for production-level servers if you're doing a lot of transactions under NTFS.

UNIX boxes don't have that issue because of raw partition support.

NTFS is better than FAT32, and scales extremely high. However, it's not totally there yet. Apparently DFS (coming in NT6) takes care of the fragmentation issue.

And yes, I know scandisk on 2K. I have a Zip drive on my workstation here. If I boot with a Zip drive, it runs Scandisk every time!

NTFS is darn good, and NTFS 5 is a heck of a sight better than NTFS 4, but it's not totally there yet.

Correctly noted. Even degrag programs must execute using Operating System code since hardware access requires OS permissions that only the OS can provide. And then there are all those 'proprietary secrets' in the NT drivers such as features that will make current NTFS play well with future functions.

Write bare code even for FAT would be a 'task' for one person. NTFS would be a 'bear' for a team. IOW full featured NTFS for Linux - I don't think its going to happen with rock hard reliability that we require for filesystems. Best one should expect without NT internal drivers is to safely read NTFS drives. Systeminternals demonstrated how one did so quite successfully.