A friend of mine gave me his 2003-4ish Gateway Pentium4 machine to work on. He was having various problems, that I have seemed to fix by running XP repair of the restore disk.

Anyway, once I got it up and running, I started received automatic updates from Microsoft, still everything seemed ok.

Next came and update for XP SP2, so I thought what the heck, I know it has better security/options than the version that came with the pc.

The pc now reboots continuously. It gets to the main splash screen that says "Windows is starting..." and then reboots over and over.

I seem to recall this as a problem that affected many users when SP2 was first released, but forgot about it until now. Does anybody know the fix? I can uninstall SP2 or rerun the repair if I need to.

Is this an issue with his BIOS needing an update?

Thanks, Randy

I think you have it right, I would uninstall SP2 and search for a BIOS update. I seem to remember that certain manufacturers had some funny BIOS issues with SP2 as well. It won't hurt even if it doesn't work with SP2

I agree. Gateway computers are squirrely. Boot in safe mode, uninstall SP2. Reboot. Update bios. Reboot. Try SP2 again...

Here is another possible solution:

PC World XP SP2 Install Woes

Yet more possibilities....
Microsoft KB Article

Windows XP SP2 Problem Solver

Wow. Look at all of the Calvins looking around at the same time... Fun! I guess I could have just edited my first post, but I need every post credit I can get to try to catch up with the rest of the people around here. Heck, I remember when Sirquack and I were neck-in-neck in posts, then he took off, and I stayed about the same number of posts. I guess I have more things to do "at work" than he does.

Thanks Nick for the link, your right about this gateway, man it sucks. I've tried every patch, fix, etc., and this machine just does not like SP2. I was able to get past the reboot....reboot...reboot be selecting F8 during reboot and turning off the option for reboot when receiving an error. However I just keep getting different conflicts/errors once I get into windows.

I attempted a BIOS upgrade following Gateways support page instruction, however the floppy bootable flash disk I created won't even boot. I basically have repaired it back to default from the factory, applied XP SP1, and am manually updating some of the important security patches.

I think as old as this machine is, these people won't need SP2 anyway, they will most likely get something new soon anyway. I've turned off the SP2 update from notifying them in the future that it is available.

On another note, if you have not heard of "The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" this thing rocks. http://www.ubcd4win.com

I have another machine I'm working on that has been a problem child for my friend. As soon as he gets on dial up, or broadband, SOMETHING (worm, spyware, etc) starts uploading packets of information to his machine. This totally makes the machine crawlllll and you can't navigate on the internet either. You can't even update your virus or spyware, etc., because of what is uploading. I've tried everything I know, and this CD is great, and free. It includes many of the free tools out there many of us use. The nice thing is you create a bootable CD using a valid O/S and can isolate and eliminate problems without having to load windows.

later

ive never had real great luck using the repair function, or system restore for anything serious. Best bet is to wipe the HDD, and do a fresh install of everything. Takes longer and you loose alot of things but its like having a brand new pc again.

It boots into safe mode but not into real mode? Hangs at the point where XP proper starts loading? It may be either an application or driver. More likely a driver as they load earlier in the boot process. Have you tried updating the video driver? SP2 blew up a few installations in it's day because it is pretty touchy about drivers, especially mass storage drivers and video drivers.

Also, if you are successfully booted into XP SP1, go to the Gateway site and see if they have a Windows-mode BIOS update. This is an app you execute within Windows that writes the file temporarily to nvram and performs the update when you reboot. It then sets the "clear nvram" bit and reboots again.

I've got the UBCD and UBDVD which are both awesome. They have saved me many times when working on people's (or even my) PC...