Lexington Computer Repair Blog

When I was responsible for software development teams I used to often say that sometimes it was good to know when to give up early. Most good software developers that I know are ambitious problem solvers and if you manage to give them an “impossible” task they will work on it until the cows come home trying to fix it “Impossible” tasks have a virtually unlimited set of rabbit holes, false solutions and sub-problems to be solved, these erata often conceal the true solution which is to give up and try something completely different. Such is the advice I should have been giving myself in trying to repair the HP Pavillion 533w that’s been on the bench here for several days.

I’m not sure what the machine has been through in getting to me, it appears to have lots of Windows updates but is in pre-SP2 state. The two key problems I faced were:

1. Non-destructive recovery install stalls after setting keyboard and language
2. After problem 1 was solved, Windows update stalled at “Checking for latest updates for your computer…”

For Problem 1, it turns out that some HP Pavillions have a bug in their non-destructive recovery solution. This bug causes the install to report that it cannot location the file c_20127.nls on the recovery drive and then eventually seizes up.

To fixed this, I used a modified version of these instructions:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericSoftwareDownloadIndex?lc=EN&cc=us&softwareitem=pv-9155-1

(also referenced here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q329450)

As you will note, these instructions call for the use of a floppy disk, they might just as well have suggested that you use your keypunch machine to type the solution onto Hollerith cards – who uses floppies anymore? As it turns out, you can modify the instructions to use a USB flash drive by changing the references in the .BAT file for “A:” to “D:” (there are 2 references), copying the files to the root of your USB Flash drive, and ensuring that the flash drive is plugged in to the problem computer when it is booted. Follow the HP instructions but find your files on d: instead of a:. In my case I had to do the install again to get the fix to take.

Once Windows XP Home was loaded back on the machine I was disappointed (to say the least) that the system would not access Windows Update. I think this problem was related to some spyware that had been on the machine previously.

Broken Windows Update that results from viruses and spyware can be very difficult to fix. Here is where the wise and experienced computer tech will probably decide to do a clean install. But not me. There are a lot of reasons why Windows Update fails. There are hundreds of things to try. In the past, I have found that the registry keys for Automatic Update Service or BITS had been altered from %SystemRoot%… to %fystemRoot%. That was not the case for this machine.

What finally did work for this machine can be found here:

http://taurarian.mvps.org/WU_XP/0×8024402f.htm

By the time I got to Step 4, the problem was fixed. Hallelujah!

P.S., oh and I also renamed the SoftwareDistribution folder to .OLD, don’t know if that impacted the solution.