Jesper Johansson write an interesting article about fixing a problem with upgrading to Windows XP Service Pack 3 or to be specific: constantly reboots after you’ve upgraded to SP3. The problem can be caused after you’ve upgraded to SP3 on AMD-based computers and on some Intel based computers.

To fix this problem Jesper recomends following steps:

You may not see the error code because the computer reboots too fast. To force the computer to stop when it crashes, you need to set an option during startup. To do so, hit the F8 key during restart right when you see the black Windows XP screen come up. Then select the “Disable automatic restart on system failure” option, as shown below:

To fix the problem, boot into safe mode, or boot to a WinPE disk, or into the recovery console, and disable the intelppm.sys driver. You do not need it on an AMD-based computer anyway. To boot into Safe Mode, hit the F8 key as above, and select Safe Mode instead. You will need your Administrator account to log on in safe mode. To disable the driver, take the following steps:

If you booted into the recovery console, from a command prompt, run “disable intelppm”
If you booted into safe mode you can run “sc config intelppm start= disabled”
If you booted into WinPE, you have to manually edit the registry. Do this:

1. Run regedit
2. Click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
3. From the File menu, select “Load hive”
4. Navigate to %systemdriver%\Windows\System32\Config on the dead system and select the file name System
5. Name it something you can remember, such as “horked”
6. Navigate to horked\ControlSet001\Services\IntelPPM
7. Double click the Start value and set it to 4
8. If you did what I did and completely destroyed things by running a disk check, navigate to ControlSet001\Control\SessionManager. Open the BootExecute value and clear out the autochk entries
9. Repeat steps 6-8 for the other control sets.
10. Reboot

If this was your problem, the computer should now reboot just fine.

There is another minoring problem reported with this error message: “Problem was detected and windows has been shut down to protect your computer from damage. The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant”.

According to Jasper you can solve this if you:

insert a USB flash drive, or some other form of secondary storage mechanism, before booting the computer.

Very simple solution.

Read more at Jesper Johansson blog.

Tags | Computers, Howto, Installation, Windows, Windows XP