Missives from the 6th Floor

Pulling the old MB, CPU, and card out of my existing case and installing the new parts took about an hour.

I figured I'd have some hand-holding to do - after all the machine went to sleep as an AMD Athlon on an ASUS motherboard with a Via chipset and woke up as an Intel Core-Duo on a Gigabyte motherboard with an Intel chipset.

Linux first. It wasn't happy. The kernel booted, couldn't find the root filesystem, spat out some diagnostics, and stoped on "boot failed."

So I grabbed the Fedora DVD, booted into rescue mode - it found the new hardware, mounted my existing install, and one mkinitrd later, I was back in business.

Elapsed time: about 15 minutes.

Next up, Windows.

The machine started to boot, then spontaneously rebooted. Not surprising, but also not very helpful. Tried again, and saw that there was actually a blue screen in there, but it was rebooting faster than I could possibly read anything off of it.

No matter, I knew what was wrong, and a little googling told me that my two options were: 1. reinstall from scratch, or 2. try to "repair" the existing install by booting the install CD and letting it detect the existing install.

Which it did.

After it was done re-installing from the SP2 media, I booted successfully - elapsed time: 45 minutes.

But it's not over yet.

See that re-install had reverted Windows to it's "virgin" SP2 state - so I had to re-apply Windows updates.

All 90-something of them.

And to make matters worse, all Windows Update would do is download all the updates and refuse to install them.

After a bit of hunting around Microsoft's KB (and finding no shortage of articles on troubleshooting Windows Update), I found a log file in the windows directory that led me to the problem - apparently reinstalling Windows can unregister one of the critical COM dlls used by Windows Update - and the user-visible symptom is some hex error code.

Once I had the solution, I was able to stop the Windows Update Service, re-register the COM dll, restart the service, and start installing patches, which took another hour or so, with a couple reboots thrown in for good measure.

Total time spent baby-sitting Windows: almost 4 hours.

Great, huh?