*Sigh* You know exactly where this is going, don’t you?

I haven’t updated my PC for at least a year. I don’t use it that much but I was going to try out Half-Life 2 (in particular, I wanted to play around with the Source engine) and I thought it was about time I updated Windows. It’s been a while since SP2 came out, so they must have ironed out the creases by now, right?

First of all I had to download an update in order to download SP2. Then SP2 downloaded just fine. It installed just fine. When it came to rebooting - nothing. The PC starts and does the usual DOS-y stuff but as soon as it tries to launch Windows - nothing. Just a black screen. Press a key and it reboots again.

I googled and found that sometimes this happens with certain processors - but mine wasn’t one of them. I updated the motherboard BIOS for good measure but still no joy. I tried F8-ing and trying ’safe mode’ and ‘last good version’ but still nothing. Unfortunately I don’t have a rescue disk for this PC but I did manage to try the Recovery Console on a Windows disk, but that was no use either.

Thankfully, I did manage to get everything off the machine by using a Linux distro called Knoppix which runs directly from a CD and I transferred all the stuff I wanted from the hard drive to a USB drive.

Hopefully a clean install of XP will get the PC back up and running - but that’s a treat I’ll save for another day.