Dimension PC with Win NT 4.0 SP 6a won't boot following Windows critical update

Hi,

Since you're running the NT 4.0 Workstation, you can go to the PDF and run Server Manager from there (as the Admin, naturally).  In Server Manager, you can stop the service(s) which is/are locking up your workstation.

Other than that, pull the drive, place it in a working NT 4.0 workstation system, then at least you'll have access to the system from there. Restore from backup, etc.

In the future, you might want to consider putting one fix on at a time and testing for stability before going on to the next patch.

Good luck,

Uncle Crusty

Thanks for your reply, but what is the PDF?  I'm not familiar with that term as it relates to NT.  I'm also not familiar with the Server Manager.  Right now, I can't get the OS up and running at all, so stopping services or even looking at the Event Log is impossible.  I do have access to the drive across my network, but I never shared the C drive on my network, so I can only backup my data only.

See if you can get logged in by using the "last known good" option.  Here's an illustration.

Jim

Message Edited by jimw on 08-21-2003 02:33 PM

I wish I could offer some advice, but thus far, I haven't found any solution to this problem short of reinstalling the OS from scratch.  Nothing allows me to get past the Ctrl-Alt-Del login screen and the dialog informing me that at least one service or driver didn't load correctly.  I started to try a repair using the origninal NT CD, three boot floppies and an old Emergency Repair Disk, but so many files come up saying the files on my hard drive are newer than the files on the CD (obviously they are newer because they are from the SP 6a install), that I gave up trying that approach.

I just recently bought a new Dell 8300 (I guess I'm a masochist) and I plan to eventually put my NT drive into my new machine as a slave drive.  I hope to back up the C drive (which contains my Outlook email file) to my new machine before trying to install NT from scratch (followed by updates to SP 6a and download of critical updates - over and over again).  Gotta love Microsoft %$#@@$^*!

If anyone has any better ideas out there, I'd still like to hear them.  I'm not looking forward to reinstalling and upgrading NT.

I had the exact same problem twice; once I could fix it by using the "Last good startup" option at bootup, but the second time I had to do a whole new install of NT.  Then, none of the MS Office 2000 apps would work right; I had to use MS comcheck.exe to determine and fix the MDAC components that apparently also got hosed by the Secuity Update package.  I think it's good advice to apply the patches one at a time with a reboot in between - I haven't had any problems that way.  I should have listened to my 6th sense about installing them all in one big package - never again!!.

 

Dave Waters 

I've had this same experience with my Dell Latitude running NT 4.0 SP 6a and then downloading the MS critical updates and not being able to boot (blue screen).  However, I was able to boot the machine by selecting NT [VGA mode] during startup which results in 640 x 480 graphics. 

Here's the fix that worked for me:  I upgraded the Flash Bios from A05 to A16.  After that, the video driver (ati2mpab.sys) loaded without any errors and I was able to apply the Windows updates without any additional problems.   I had to make a floppy disk and boot it to DOS for the upgrade since my BIOS was so old, but the instructions are pretty simple.  I hope this helps.