Windows NT's Infernal Filesystem

Here be dragons.

This is the t-shirt I wore to work today. By the end of the day, it was a painful reminder of just how wrong a service pack install can go. So - I've installed SP2 on two XP boxes. One at home, and my test box at work. I waited until today during lunch to upgrade my normal workstation. And, oh how it did break. Sigh.

During the backing up of files, it complained about not being able to read one file. I skipped that file. Then, after the upgrade, RPC wouldn't start. Well now - considering how much on a Windows box depends on RPC, I was pretty well fucked. In task manager, my username did not show up for processes I had started. I couldn't view individual events in event viewer. I couldn't move icons on the desktop. New windows I opened were not showing up on the taskbar. I couldn't resize the taskbar unless Quick Launch was enabled, and even if it was I still sometimes couldn't resize it. I couldn't add a new local user to the local administrators group. I couldn't start RPC (access denied).

I exported my entire system log to a text file so I could see what happened. Bad block on the hard drive. Run chkdsk. Reboot. It finds errors. RPC still won't start!

Had to get one of the IT guys come by and change all of these services to start as the local system account rather than a network account. That got me back up and running, but I still had a bad hard drive to contend with. And these services are *supposed* to run with a network account. This breaks several things in a computer that's joined to a domain.

As it ends up, I got little work done this afternoon. I did, on the other hand, get a new computer. But then I spent 3 extra hours after work getting the apps I use on it. Oh wait, I forgot Ethereal. Dang it. I did not reinstall SP2 on the new machine. I'll sit tight and wait for IT's blessing. So much for being on top of Windows security.

But hey, the old machine was a 800MHz Pentium III w/512MB RAM and the new one's a 2.8GHz P4 w/1GB RAM. I'll live.