Hi Jon,
I believe a while back I read that SP1 would not install on a pirated
copy of XP. Did you receive XP Home disk from someone else?
If this is not the case, then try searching google.com or teoma.com to
see if you come up with why this will not load. If you have legal copies
of the OS, and maybe downloaded your SP from the web, it could be just a
bad download and you may have had too many programs or processes running
in the background while you tried to grab it. You can always try to get
another copy but I've always followed the rule with any MS OS to be sure
I shut down unnecessary processes and programs to grab any updates.
Same rule holds for me when I install or uninstall a program. Less
interference to deal with and possibly corruption of a file(s).
Here is one forum page I was reading:
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=143207
On one of my desktops, I actually did a complete reformat of XP and
immediately after all was well and I rebooted, I then closed all uneeded
background processes and in particular made sure nothing was running
like anti-virus, screen saver, etc...and then loaded SP1. This to
alleviate or hoped to, the loooong list of problems associated with the
install of SP1 after you already have many programs installed and have
been using XP for awhile. (I did not do the format and install of XP
just for this reason...I had to anyway, but then the disk came in for XP
SP1 and it made sense to load them both from the start and then do all
of the configs, etc...before anything else was loaded). Never had a
problem that was associated with the install of the SP later.
Recent notebook I just purchased had SP1 already installed...it was just
the matter of a few updates.
Try again keeping things in mind as I mentioned and let us know if you
were able to finish the install.
Take Care...
Dee
