Tips and Tricks for:  SQL Server

The Problem:   Blue Screen upgrading VIsta 64 to SP1

In late 2007 I purchased a HP dv9500t laptop with 4GB of RAM and 2 hard disks.  I thought the 2 disks would be pretty useful and went with the 64 bit OS to use all the memory and facilitate running virtual machines and testing 64 bit code.  What a mistake!

I really couldn't stand Vista.  Even after turning off UAC the slowness, the intermittent screen blackouts, the strange mouse behavior, the inability to keep the start menu the same, and did I mention the slowness, all combined to drive me nuts.  Part of the problem was that I tried to switch to Office 2007 at the same time and didn't appreciate the change for change sake mentality.  I've since become familiar with Office 2007 but it's an annoyance.  After being unable to downgrade the machine to XP I decided that killing a few more days in the effort wasn't worth it and I opted to purchase a very nice Dell M6300 with XP.  I've been happy ever since.

But my I have a few things on there that I use from time to time and my wife decided to use it and didn't mind Vista.  She wanted to update Adobe CS3 to CS4 on that machine but it requires SP1.  That shouldn't 'have been a problem, just download it and run the upgrade.  Little did I know

I even had Vista SP1 on a DVD in my MSDN subscription.  I Popped the disk in the drive run the install and leave it for a few hours.  That should be all it takes.  Right?

When I returned to the room the machiine was booting and going to the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in a cycle that ran about 60 seconds.  The BSOD message was "The procedure entry point at NtClearAllSavePointsTransaction could not be located in ntdll.dll".

Fortunately system restore worked and I was back to square zero.  I tried various advice from the web with out any success.  It turned out that the HP site had the answer.  It was a bit obscure but the solution amounted to:

Solution: Upgrade the BIOS using the HP upgrade utility.

That wasn't too difficult.  I actually upgraded more but I'm pretty sure that's what it amounted to.  Let Windows Update do all it's updates and let HP's utility to all of it's.

The only other valuable lesson to come out if this was the value of backing up the drive with Acronis TrueImage and using their recovery manager, which can restore before booting.