79 replies to this topic

[ems88]

Ztruker, thanks for all your help Tomk, I'll ask around and see who has it. Is the CD supposed to look like this?

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Edited by ems88, 02 September 2009 - 10:13 PM.

[Tomk]

You are going to need Ztruker or someone else who knows what they are talking about to verify that for you. That appears to be XP proffesional and I believe you have XP home. I don't know if that will work. I'm betting that one of the Tech Team will know though.

[Raktor]

[Ztruker]

No, that's a Dell recovery CD. You need a Windows XP Home installation CD. It will have a hologram on the label and say Windows XP Home Edition. Upgrade or full retail version will work. It will also need to be at the same ser ice pack level that you system is at, which I believe is SP3, so .... this now gets more complicated.

First see if you can borrow one and try it. If it won't work because it's not at the same SP level, I can help fix that.

[Ztruker]

Is there a \I386 folder on the Dell CD you do have? If so, then you can try following the instructions in the Marc Liron article I pointed you to. It's the part that starts:

Annoying, YES!

Is there a workaround YES!

I'ts about half way through the article. Basically it tells you how to copy the files from the \I386 folder to \I386 on your hard drive, then change the registry to point there instead of to a CD if a file is needed by SFC.

Take alook at it and see if you have a \I386 folder on your CD. If yes, then we can give this a try.

(Thanks for the idea Doug )

[ems88]

Yes, there's an I368 folder on the CD.

[appleoddity]

That's not a Dell recovery CD. It is a Dell labeled XP pro w/ SP2 Installation CD. The only difference is that it has an embedded product key. It would behave identical to any XP pro installation CD on any computer, except a product key won't need to be entered. Activation still required.

[Ztruker]

Good catch appleoddity, I missed that one completely.

Since that's the case, the problem with SFC is that the CD is at SP2 while the computer is at SP3. That can be remedied by creating a new XP CD slipstreamed with SP3. Here are some directions on how to do this:

The simplest way to create a Bootable Windows XP Pro or Home Installation CD Slipstreamed with SP3 is to use Autostreamer. You point to your XP Pro/Home CD, the SP3 Service Pack .exe file, give it a path to write the .iso file to and off it goes. In 5 or 10 minutes you have a .iso file that you can burn to CD with almost any CD burner program you want to use. I used Roxio 7. There is a good freeware burner called DeepBurner which will do this also.

Here is the link to Autostreamer: http://www.softpedia...ostreamer.shtml

You can download the SP3 .exe here: http://www.microsoft...;displaylang=en

Use the new CD when you run SFC.

If that doesn't resolve the problem, it's time to think about doing a Repair Install. This leaves your data and most installed software (not all though) alone, though you will have to apply all the updates for SP3 when done.

Good instructions for doing it are here: How to repair Windows XP

[ems88]

When Autostreamer is creating the new CD, it keeps stalling out 1/2 way through. Is there another way to do this?

[Ztruker]

Here are manual steps to do this. I've never tried them so have no experience to offer. Let me know if oyu have any questions and we can work through it together.How to slipstream XP SP3

Edited by Ztruker, 08 September 2009 - 01:30 PM.

[Ztruker]

Also, here is another form the Dell forums. It says that using nLite instead of Autostreamer works.

http://en.community....t/19252831.aspx

[ems88]

When I tried doing it manually, after I put in "C:\XPSP3 /integrate:C:\XPSETUP" it says that "is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." With nLite, I don't understand what I'm supposed to select in the first step. There's a message that pops up everytime I select the location, it tells me that I need to select the folder with I386 or AMD64 but when I do choose that folder, the same message comes up.

[Ztruker]

See if the directions here help: nLite 1.4 Tutorial

XPSP3 is what you should have named the SP3 service pack you downloaded and placed in the root of the C: drive in step 1 of the manual tutorial. It should be C:\XPSP3.exe. It should be 316 MB (331,805,736 bytes) in size.

So when you open a command prompt, typing c:\xpsp3 should launch c:\xpsp3.exe with the parameters shown,

C:\XPSP3 /integrate:C:\XPSETUP

Edited by Ztruker, 09 September 2009 - 08:22 PM.

[ems88]

Thanks, the directions did help but it tells you to download SP2 instead of SP3 and it uses SP2 automatically..how do I change it to SP3?

[Tomk]

Rich and Ken, It looks to me like he has SP2. Please verify. I could be wrong. ems88, Please right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select properties. In the screen that comes up, does it say Service Pack 2 or Service Pack 3.