SP2--any idea how long...? (Fixed now!!!)

[Telepc]

Yeah, I saw the sticky note, but a day too late unfortunately. The worst part is, for a certain piece of software that relates to my work, I have to have SP2, so there's no downgrading for me.

And it is a complete disaster with PT. Fire up PTLE, click open session (or new session, or anything) and you get an instant blue screen of death with lots of writing on it that goes away too quickly to read, then it shuts down & restarts the machine.

Huge drag that all my PT gear is now unusable. And no, I don't really feel like buying a new computer right now. The one I have (that used to work great) is enough.

Anyone heard any words from Digi on this besides the sticky note above?
(Gateway M-500, 1 gig RAM, DIGI 002-R, Seagate 160 Gb Firewire drive, PTLE 6.4).

[bladesg]

Partition your drive and install Win XP SP1 to the partition and you can have yourself a dual boot system. Or even get yourself another HDD and a couple of caddies to allow for swapping OS's.

[K.B.]

Excellent advice.

Or if you already have several partitions, clear one out (or at least fully back up) and install another XP into it, and make that your PT boot option. Then strip it down of all unneccessaries, and don't install SP2.

Posted this earlier in another thread:

go to here (but don't do 11 or 26) or take a look at this thread.

[bb_aus]

duel boot is always going to be your best option
some people seem to be having mixed sucess with replacing the firewire drivers with those from sp1
RME are advising the same

[sikoniko]

In my opinion, these are ridiculous alternatives. MS has been beta testing SP2 for about 6 months now for this exact reason. It may be a short term solution to create another partition, but I feel it is Digidesigns responsability to keep up with the OS in a timely manner.

[bb_aus]

SP2 has caused countless problems with software from all fields
numerous people have had ProTools running smoothly on pre releases of SP2 - it has been in devolopment for so long and has changed so much that digidesign would not of been able to even keep up with the changes let alone have time to devolop updates to work with it. how much other software has been updated for sp2?
why do so many people want to upgrade (unless you need it for other applications - i know that was the origional point of the post) if it aint broke dont fix it.
if what you have is working fine leave it alone
the only reason i started using xp at all was to run ProTools

there were a number of compatibility issues with win 2000 sp3 and sp4 with the introduction of xp coding

[K.B.]

I'm still waiting to hear what exactly it does...

[Telepc]

Thanks for the replies folks.

To answer your question Karel, SP2 is actually wonderful. It has the security features that MS should have addressed years ago, IMO. Most notably it's now just about impossible for a hijacker program to make its way into your system from the 'Net. Other areas of my OS are much more streamlined too, particularly wireless networking.

Oh yeah, but it crashes ProTools LE.

I've never done a partition before. Can someone educate me? Remember, this is a laptop computer (so a second system drive is not possible--already have the second FW audio drive).

How do I "install" XP onto this new partition?
Do I use the system disks that came with my laptop?
Then do I install a whole new version of PTLE on that Partition?
How do I then startup from this partition when running PT?
Will I have to have a separate Hardware Profile for this, or is that automatic?

Thanks for any and all help--you've been great to assist me.

[K.B.]

I wouldn't know about a laptop, but I think I answered some of those questions a while back here.

I really should update that!

You don't need fdisk, you can do it all from within XP.

Microsoft have no issue with multi-booting (I don't know where I got that from!)

You install one XP. Go into Start / Settings / Control Panel / Admin tools / computer management / storage / disk management and create another partition (or more) from there, within XP. Careful planning is essential. Give each partition you plan to install a boot option into at least 20gig (I say).

Then put your XP disk in and tell it you want to install, and then do so to your newly created D: drive. The system creates a new MBR (master boot record) which always resides on C: and gives you a menu when you boot up. Repeat this as often as you like for more bootable partitions. I have 5 on this machine.

If you use Partition Magic you can improve on this (or by being clever within XP) and have a small 100MB C: drive that is not a bootable partition but keeps your MBR safe from any nonsense that may take place in your OSs. It's very important that you never corrupt your MBR or you may have to start all over again (inc possible loss of data etc) in all your OSs.

To reassure you, I have no such small C: drive here, and have been running 5x boot set-ups on two machines for over a year with no problems whatsoever. And one uses RAID on the data drive (don't think about using RAID on the system drive).

The MBR, and boot-up menu options are easily edited from start / settings / control panel / system / advanced / startup / settings. Contrary to advice you may hear elsewhere, you don't have to edit scary lines of code. It's easy.

Forget about hardware profiles. Waste of time IMHO.

Of course some ready made systems won't let you interfere with the way they're set up.

Does that help?

[Telepc]

Fantastic Karel, thanks. I'm going to take a run at it this weekend.