Rate this Entry

Marooned with Windows XP

Posted March 27th, 2013 at 7:17 PM by Alexander Nicholi

A few days ago, being on spring break and all, I decided to install a copy of Windows XP (SP3) onto my computer. It was a lot of fun getting to have back the very first OS I laid my hands on so many years ago, but there came a problem: the installation stopped me from selecting my other two operating systems at startup.

Before XP I had Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12 on my system disk as well, and something screwed up my BIOS in a way that I'll probably never see them again. And then there's another problem with XP: no sound.

After installation, XP doesn't want to recognize my sound card, which I have to have for me to do anything productive. Right now I'm searching through answers for my problem, and as it turns out a lot of people have this same problem with XP's SP3 in particular.

Apparently in order to fix my sound drivers, I have to first install an update called kb888111.exe. The problem with that is that every time I try to run it, it has a problem with the integrity of its update.inf file. Looking into that I've ended up doing a lot of funky changes with the registry and my system's CatRoot2 folder involving the Windows Cryptography Service, all to absolutely zero avail. See, when I try renaming CatRoot2, it either says (at the command prompt) access denied, or (in Explorer) it is being used by another process. When I try to move it, I know I've already stopped the cryptography service, so I don't know what else could be holding it and its contents from me. Through trial and error (God only knows how) I managed to rename the folder once at random. Sucks for me that I don't know what I did that freed it up D:.

If there's anyone who has a clue what the heck I'm talking about, I hope you'd be kind enough to help me with this.
Posted inUncategorized
Views 842 Comments 1
« Prev     Main     Next »
Total Comments 1

Comments

  1. Old Comment
    Leafgreen2itsmyidea's Avatar
    You maid a partition in which you've installed Windows XP?
    Well then use EasyBCD to add Windows 7 and Ubuntu back to the Boot Manager, If you formatted the whole disk, then burn a disk with a Windows 7 ISO on it (I will not tell you how to get it)
    But, First try the EasyBCD trick.
    Posted March 27th, 2013 at 9:37 PM by Leafgreen2itsmyidea Leafgreen2itsmyidea is offline