| Date: | June 29, 2004 / year-entry #259 |
| Tags: | other |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040629-00/?p=38653 |
| Comments: | 24 |
| Summary: | It's like stupid warning labels on consumer products: Once you read the warning label, you can already imagine the lawsuit that required the warning label to be written in the first place. Use that same imagination to interpret this Windows XP SP2 setup error message. [Dumb typo in title fixed 7:43am.] |
It's like stupid warning labels on consumer products: Once you read the warning label, you can already imagine the lawsuit that required the warning label to be written in the first place. Use that same imagination to interpret this Windows XP SP2 setup error message. [Dumb typo in title fixed 7:43am.] |
Comments (24)
Comments are closed. |
So, what happens if a service pack craps out partway through? Presumably, the tricky part is during reboot, when system files get updated. Does this not restart? Will it automatically abort?
Yeah, this should theoretically not be a problem at all. If it is, well, there are more important things to worry about.
Typo: s/lead/led
D’oh. Fixed. Thanks, OCD.
So what are the consequences of the service pack installation failing part way through? Is this only an issue with the RC versions, or is the finished product going to be similarly risky? I only ask, because I do some work for a company in south Florida which is prone to the occasional brownout at unfortunate moments…
And on the subject of stupid error messages, I once received an error from Outlook Express that said quite simply "Error: The operation could not be completed because the operation completed successfully." Not very helpful in the grand scheme of things…
I’ve already been burned by this on unistall -too low a battery for the reboot to take, which leaves you thinking your HDD is buggered. So I dont think its a spurious error at all. I even thought I was plugged in; someone had pulled the power cord during the day.
The url above is broken; something on the page is converting ampersand into & even in a URL. that is a weblog bug, I believe.
Unfortunately, a half-installed service pack can be a problem. The install is not an atomic operation (and given the architecture of the OS, I can’t see an easy way to make it so).
However, the new installer technology provides an spuninst.txt file that can be used to uninstall the service pack (even a half-installed one) (provided the installer chose to archive files) from the Recovery Console, which almost always allows the machine to boot, after which the half-installed service pack can be uninstalled properly through add/remove programs.
I remember as far back as 98 when Microsoft were touting that shutting off the machine during Setup operations wouldn’t break things.
As I’m sure it’s possible, I’m surprised this isn’t being pursued much more. I mean, it would probably help to resolve a lot of support headaches to make this bulletproof.
You can also tell that the error message was written by a programmer, not a docs person, since it uses the word "machine." ;)
Re: Broken link.
Steve Loughran, that’s correct behavior for links in HTML. It’s just that few people bother to implement the correct behavior (esp as up to (but not including) XHTML, the correct behavior on seeing something beginning with an ampersand, but not creating a known entity, is to leave it in — which means it’s only a problem when the names of your query parameters match known entity names.
Oh, and Mike Dunn, don’t forget about "AC power", which might be considered similarly technical.
Kudos to the person who programmed this (or found this as a QA).
It makes sense, just like the defragmenter should not (and does not) run when battery power is low. [On XP Home]
People are laughing because the wording of the message makes it sound like "AC Power" is somehow different from battery power in a way that affects the operation of the software.
This probably wasn’t the intention though, as we know that AC power is converted to DC before it reaches the electronics (and thus software) in your computer.
It probably takes a particular type of mind to interpret it incorrectly though :-)
"I remember as far back as 98 when Microsoft were touting that shutting off the machine during Setup operations wouldn’t break things. "
I was working as an intern in IBM’s OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise [1] group while Windows 95 was in beta test. One afternoon, some of the testers decided to play around with our copy of the Windows 95 beta and installed it on one of the test boxes. Of course, since nobody had seen it before, we were all curious about the "competition" and clustered around the display to see what all the hype was about. After half an hour of playing around with the beta and the expected "OS/2 is much better than this cr#p" smack talk, we decided to start DriveSpacing the disk, pull the plug on the machine, and let the partition go up in flames. But, as soon as we restarted the machine, it just resumed DriveSpacing the disk like nothing happened. That was probably the moment I first realized that Win95 was "for real", and here to stay, technical issues like the infamous Win16Lock aside.
1] Lan Server Enterprise was basically Lan Server built on top of IBM’s OS/2 DCE implementation. I wish I knew whatever became of the product. My internship ended before shipment.
I doubt Windows updates will ever be atomic. I love to use the glibc upgrade example whenever anyone wants to get in a pissing contest about how Windows is better
And Lan Server was basically Lan Manager repackaged (I know that because I was the author of the Dos Lan Requestor :)). Of course we called it the DOS Lan Manager redirector.
James Mastros:
yeah, makes sense for XHTML that all ampersands are escaped. But both mozilla and I get it wrong.
[pause], with View Source engaged
Ok. an ampersand in the URL in the comment box is being double escaped, to
&amp
This *is* a bug. But it is also the classic are-you-escaping-the-right-number-of-times bug, where everyone needs to escape/unescape at the same no. of times.
But even in a country with reliable AC power (more reliable than I had in the US), I still dread flashing BIOSes on machines that don’t have batteries. I’ve been lucky, no power failures while flashing BIOSes, but I prefer to rely on more than luck.
2. In the other 20%, AC power doesn’t help a bit. On one machine, Windows 2000 hanged in the middle of installing SP3. It wasn’t a BSOD, it was a hang, freeze, whatever you want to call it, but it’s still dead and the only way to begin using the machine again is the same: turn the power off and back on. (Well, with a BSOD Windows 2000 or XP defaults to automatically rebooting so ordinary users don’t even know that the thing BSOD’ed, but for us abnormal users who get to see BSOD’s, the recovery method is the same.)
But not this time. I turned the power off and on, Windows 2000 went to the logon screen, and it wouldn’t accept any password, it died because MSGINA or something like that had been updated but a related part of SP3 hadn’t been updated. I couldn’t even login in safe mode. Selecting "last known good" didn’t make any difference because it did not restore the last known good dll’s to where they used to be.
Thanks to someone else’s reply here, if the problem ever arises again then I know to boot the CD and try to get to the recovery console from there. I’ve booted the recovery console in XP on occasion but didn’t notice the possibility in 2000. Anyway I’ll try it if necessary.
What I actually had to do was reinstall W2000 from scratch. No I didn’t lose any data and I didn’t complain about losing any data despite what some idiots in Usenet newsgroups said about making backups. I restored every necessary file from backups. But it still wasn’t a pleasant way to spend 9 p.m. to midnight that day, and it still doesn’t say much for the reliability of installing SPs.
This dialog box reminded me of some "interesting" moments with Microsoft software messages too.
I used a computer without a printer. As such, I obviously turned off the spooler service. Trying to install a service pack I was told that since I had no printer, the sp couldn’t be installed. I actually went to MS’ site to see if this was a scam, and they had started selling printers.
Collecting all nonsensical, and showstopping, error messages and dialogs could probably fill up a subdomain for microsoft.com. This would possibly today be quite useless and only serve as fuel for (deserved? ;->) MS-bashing, but it could probably be of historic interest to look back at, say 10 years from now – to see how far we by then have come, or not. :-)
"And Lan Server was basically Lan Manager repackaged (I know that because I was the author of the Dos Lan Requestor :)). Of course we called it the DOS Lan Manager redirector. "
At the time, IBM was trying pretty hard to change that. I was in testing, so I didn’t see any of the code, but of those that did, they were divided into "dirty" and "clean" camps. "Dirty" meant you had seen MS code and couldn’t contribute to the new, entirely-IBM, implementation of Lan Server (which was to post-date LSE, IIRC). I think a lot of it had to do with them being sick of seeing the Microsoft copyright message displayed all over their product. :-)
In Russian translation in XP title for new hardware wizard says: "A ‘new hardware wizard’ is found" ;)
instead of new modem it found a new hardware wizard.
"Typo: s/lead/led"
Hehe, had to chuckle at that. =)
I’d put it on AC power, start the service pack installation and remove AC just on spite. ;-)