Saturday 13 June 2009

XP Pro to Vista Enterprise In-Place Upgrade Error – Workstation Reboots

We are in the process of concluding a project for one of our non-profit clients upgrading their Windows XP Professional workstations to Windows Vista Enterprise with Service Pack 1.

One of the workstations refused to come back up on the reboot that takes us into the user name, password if any, computer name, and network type. It kept getting into the Windows Vista boot cycle to the point where the screen would go black just prior to the first question screen.

After watching the system do this for a couple of cycles, the one thing that seemed to be happening all the time was the optical drive light coming on solid just before the spontaneous reboot. The Windows Vista Enterprise DVD in the drive would not spin up though.

So, after trying to get into Safe Mode and being told that the install routine could not run in Safe Mode, we pulled the DVD just before the point where the light would come on.

The install routine kept happily humming along and eventually got to the requisite questions.

Here we are a number of hours later running the first round of WSUS delegated updates:

image

The troublesome workstation is not shown in this screenshot as it has seemingly started the update installs when we put it into a forced reboot cycle.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

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