XP in a strange state - It's beyond me.

[Guest]

I bought a special VGA to SCART (TV) lead for my WMCE set up and ended up
crashing the system with a corrupted or missing system file. I put the S
Video lead back in place. Not having an up to date recovery disk I decided to
reinstall XP Media Centrer on top of the existing install.

When loading XP it asked for the SP2 disc, which I had (from PC Pro). It
wouldn't recognise it.

When the XP screen finally appeared it had the Windows classic appearance. I
tried to run the ATI set up utility for the mobo and built in graphics but I
got an error message 'WP failed to launch setup engine, RPC server is
unavailable'. I updated the drivers for the devices manually.

Meanwhile I discovered that I had no network. IPCONFIG reports 'Media State
- Media Disconnected' despite driver seemingly OK. No response to 'set up
network' in control panel.

I tried to look at disc management but it said' unable to connect to logical
disk manager service'

I cleared the bios twice. I reformatted the disc thoroughly using Seagate
tools and tried again with exactly the same results. I have tried reseating
the RAM etc etc.

Does anyone have any idea what's wrong?

Thanks
Phil

--
self built
Radeon chipset m/b w. 512mb
Athlon 64 3000+
Leadtek PVR2000 analog tuner
WMCE 2005

 

[Guest]

A good question for the MCE newsgroup.

 

[Guest]

No it's fundamentally an XP problem. MCE is an overlay on XP and not the
source of these problems. Do you have anything useful to say?

 

[Ron Sommer]

You really should get SP2 installed and take your problem to the mediacenter
newsgroup.

 

[Guest]

I guess both my respondents were right.

The culprit was a bug in the WMCE installation procedure where it asks for
the 'Windows SP2 disk'. If you put it in it says it's the wrong disc. What it
really wants is the first installation disc again. Then all goes smoothly.
Took me 5 days of pulling my hair out to figure out. This apparently a
'known' bug. If it's known why couldn't Microsoft patch the damn thing.