P2V, Windows XP, and SP3

In the continuing saga of P2V, my last plan was to wipe out the Linux instance (gasp!) on the target machine and attempt the process as strictly Windows XP. This box is an HP, so I fired up the recovery partition, and put it back to factory defaults. Of course that means there was 5 gig of garbage-ware on the C: drive, so I invested some time uninstalling stuff. Since it will once again be a dual boot system, I left things like multimedia and DVD burning software in the instance.

Once I had C: down to 10Gb (still bloated) I decided I would install SP3 on the physical machine. The plan was that the physical drive would handle the service pack better than the virtual drive. Much to my dismay, the machine booted, crashed, and rebooted. I assumed my server based copy of SP3 had been corrupted.

I was able to boot to safe mode, uninstall SP3, and recover the system to a normal desktop. That confirmed SP3 was the culprit. This time, I used Windows update. And... It crashed again. Same problem: perpetual reboot.

After loosing another hour monkeying with Microsoft's OS, I found that there is a known bug with SP3 effecting some HPs with AMD processors. Oh, thanks. I found a workaround for the problem on Jesper Johansson's blog. He's written a VBS utility that will prep the system for SP3. In my case, it worked retroactively.

At this point, SP3 is loaded, and P2V is running. Let's see what happens next.