XP Service Pack 1 hoses CD-ROM and floppy-disk access
By Brian Livingston
Microsoft's launch of its new Windows Server 2003 line is just taking place
as I write this, and my readers are starting to send fascinating tips about
its secrets. But while I'm compiling a new batch of articles on that
subject, the most interesting gotcha I've heard of this week involves
Windows XP with Service Pack 1 installed.
Jeffery Davidson, manager of information systems for the ATP Oil & Gas
Corporation, sent in the following well-documented tale. Have a listen:
· "Last week, my company purchased two new Panasonic Toughbook
laptops for some of our field personnel. I configured them with Windows XP
and Office XP, made sure that all of the patches and drivers were installed,
including XP Service Pack 1a, added all of the third-party software they
needed, and sent them out to the users.
"The users both came back yesterday and complained that they couldn't get
the floppy drives to work. After duplicating the problem, I spoke to
Panasonic's tech support, who told me that this was a problem with the SP1
installation. He referred me to Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 811839 --
'An I/O Device Error May Occur When You Access the Floppy Disk Drive in
Windows XP Service Pack 1.'
"Apparently, the problem is caused by Windows dynamically changing the
computer processor power state to a deeper idle state (from the C2 state to
the C3 state).
"To fix the problem. the article referred me to another KB article,
811840 -- 'How to Change the PromoteLimit Value for the Transition from C2
to C3 Power States.' This fix involved editing two strings of four bytes in
six binary keys in the registry, increasing the time that must elapse from
100 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds before Windows XP promotes the
processor from a C2 to a C3 power state.
"When I changed the registry, the two laptops were able to access their
floppy drives successfully.
"All well and good. Here's where I started to get concerned. Late last week,
one user who had a Compaq EVO D510 desktop machine suddenly started
experiencing severe endless loop crashes. Unable to repair the problem, I
decided to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows XP.
Initially, I was unable to restore the system from Compaq's restore disks.
The technical support folks at Compaq decided the problem was a bad restore
disk. I was able to manually install XP, and then manually install the
hardware drives from the corrupt disk.
"After the installation, I again installed ancillary programs and downloaded
patches, including XP Service Pack 1a. After SP1 was installed, I began to
experience problems with the CD-ROM drive intermittently not reading data
from the different CD-ROMs I was trying to install from.
"The error message I would get was 'An I/O error has occurred while
installing a file. This is usually caused by bad installation media or a
corrupt installation file.' I could either abort or retry. However, retrying
did nothing but repeat the error message.
"I decided to search the Microsoft knowledge base for 'I/O Errors' and
promptly saw the same KB articles I used yesterday to fix the laptops. I
decided to try the same thing on this desktop, even though I hadn't
experienced problems with the floppy drive.
"Surprisingly enough, it worked. But that's what bothers me. Why is XP SP1
causing these problems with different kinds of I/O operations? This has now
occurred on three out of the 60-odd machines I'm responsible for, so it's
widespread enough to want Microsoft to come up with a better solution than
manually editing several binary strings in the registry. For that matter,
I'd tell them myself, but they don't have a great feedback system, as you
probably know."
