Service Pack 2 Disaster?

After holding out on letting windows sp update my machine to service pack 2
for the last several months, I finally allowed it last night. I let it do
the upgrade overnight and awoke to my machine continually rebooting! It gets
past the Windows logo screen then reboots. It will start fine in the safe
mode. Any ideas on what to do next?

Uninstall Service Pack 2 in Safe Mode (SM), if you can get yourself back to a
working situation outside of SM download the administrator installation of
SP2 (assuming you have broadband) here:

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...35-SP2-ENU.exe (272391 KB)

Then install manually...

Although VERY unlikely to be the cause you might like to check your
motherboard BIOS is upto date as well...

I'm fairly computer litertate, but how would I know if the BIOS is up to
date. I have an ASUS P4PE motherboard with a P4 2.4 533 chip.

"SmokeyMcPotHead" wrote:

> Although VERY unlikely to be the cause you might like to check your
> motherboard BIOS is upto date as well...

Pay a visit to ASUS.COM.TW, download the latest BIOS for your M/B, and you
may need to download the flash program from there as well. Then try and flash
and see what it says, typically the original and new BIOS revisions are shown
before flashing. If they're not, and you may like to do this first anyway.
You should be able to see the BIOS version (typically top left of the screen)
before the machine kicks itself to a Windows boot, unless you have a logo
enabled for the M/B that is. If this is the case you'd need to go into the
BIOS and disable the logo possibly to view the BIOS revision before Windows
itself starts. It may even state the revision in the BIOS itself. Don't
forget after flashing you may need to reset up the BIOS configuration, so if
required make a note of some/any settings you might have adjusted.

Incidentally the reason I said a BIOS update is unlikely to be the solution,
is that Windows XP doesn't talk to the M/B hardware/BIOS much, for example
you can have a CD\DVD drive that's not seen by the PCs BIOS but is seen and
functions correctly within Win XP. I've seen that a few times.

Thanks for your help. I turned off the autorestart function and found out
that it was an error with an older scanner driver. After removing the driver
everything worked fine.

"SmokeyMcPotHead" wrote:

> Pay a visit to ASUS.COM.TW, download the latest BIOS for your M/B, and you
> may need to download the flash program from there as well. Then try and flash
> and see what it says, typically the original and new BIOS revisions are shown
> before flashing. If they're not, and you may like to do this first anyway.
> You should be able to see the BIOS version (typically top left of the screen)
> before the machine kicks itself to a Windows boot, unless you have a logo
> enabled for the M/B that is. If this is the case you'd need to go into the
> BIOS and disable the logo possibly to view the BIOS revision before Windows
> itself starts. It may even state the revision in the BIOS itself. Don't
> forget after flashing you may need to reset up the BIOS configuration, so if
> required make a note of some/any settings you might have adjusted.
>
> Incidentally the reason I said a BIOS update is unlikely to be the solution,
> is that Windows XP doesn't talk to the M/B hardware/BIOS much, for example
> you can have a CD\DVD drive that's not seen by the PCs BIOS but is seen and
> functions correctly within Win XP. I've seen that a few times.

Well done...

Not an Umax Scanner is it by chance. Umax hardware is great, but their
attempts to write software\drivers can only be described as pitiful, and
incompetent in the extreme.