Side by Side error

[yoji]

My wifes machine all of a sudden started to blue screen on start up... could not get into windows at all, in either normal or safe mode.

It was looking gloomy... so I loaded the original Vista (64 bit) disk and used the recovery facility. It worked away for a while... and then came back to say that it was done and Windows should boot.

Restarting, and sure enough - it booted to windows.... HOWEVER..
Practically every application and windows tool fired up with a "side by side" error.. Which looking on Web ..(e.g. here --> http://buffered.io/posts/resolving-side-by-side-configuration-issues ). seemed serious and although can be fixed for an odd app... for as many as I had - it was too much of a problem - so I just nuked it all - did a clean install and restored key data from backups.

But my question is.... was this almost inevitable? The restore disk was SP1... whereas the machine is SP2... so doing a recovery with a SP1 disk.. (which I presure would be doing something like a SFC behind the scenes)... you are almost inevitably going to end up with difficulties? but Vista does not give you a way to make a "current" restore disk.

Anyone have any insight into why this recovery failed so spectaculaly? Im interested.
(also - I want to know if I should really make sure I have a current win7 restore disk avail... or was I just unlucky.. and I should be able to use the original install disk (vanilla - no service pack))

Thanks in advance
Cheers

 

[ksiemb]

My wifes machine all of a sudden started to blue screen on start up... could not get into windows at all, in either normal or safe mode.

It was looking gloomy... so I loaded the original Vista (64 bit) disk and used the recovery facility. It worked away for a while... and then came back to say that it was done and Windows should boot.

Restarting, and sure enough - it booted to windows.... HOWEVER..
Practically every application and windows tool fired up with a "side by side" error.. Which looking on Web ..(e.g. here --> http://buffered.io/posts/resolving-side-by-side-configuration-issues ). seemed serious and although can be fixed for an odd app... for as many as I had - it was too much of a problem - so I just nuked it all - did a clean install and restored key data from backups.

But my question is.... was this almost inevitable? The restore disk was SP1... whereas the machine is SP2... so doing a recovery with a SP1 disk.. (which I presure would be doing something like a SFC behind the scenes)... you are almost inevitably going to end up with difficulties? but Vista does not give you a way to make a "current" restore disk.

Anyone have any insight into why this recovery failed so spectaculaly? Im interested.
(also - I want to know if I should really make sure I have a current win7 restore disk avail... or was I just unlucky.. and I should be able to use the original install disk (vanilla - no service pack))

Thanks in advance
Cheers

If you did a clean Install, then restored from backups, you could have re-introduced the problem, IMO.

 

[yoji]

If you did a clean Install, then restored from backups, you could have re-introduced the problem, IMO.

Think you misunderstood....

The clean reinstall worked fine.. the machine is back up and running and all is well.

My question only relates to the original use of the "recovery" tool - which enabled the machine to boot (so that was good)... but I had the "side by side" error (which was very bad)... why did that recovery not work better?

Hope that clarifies.
Cheers

 

[hang-the-9]

Think you misunderstood....

The clean reinstall worked fine.. the machine is back up and running and all is well.

My question only relates to the original use of the "recovery" tool - which enabled the machine to boot (so that was good)... but I had the "side by side" error (which was very bad)... why did that recovery not work better?

Hope that clarifies.
Cheers

A repair setup of Windows just copies over any files that Windows sees as corrupt or not the correct version. It does not touch any applications you installed or any files they put on the computer. So if you have a .dll issue with a 3rd party dll file, a repair would not touch it. When you did a full re-installation you would clear all the files.

 

[yoji]

A repair setup of Windows just copies over any files that Windows sees as corrupt or not the correct version. It does not touch any applications you installed or any files they put on the computer. So if you have a .dll issue with a 3rd party dll file, a repair would not touch it. When you did a full re-installation you would clear all the files.

Ye s- I understand that... but from my original post "Practically every application and windows tool fired up with a "side by side" error"... so it was windows tools as well. It was so prevelent that I assume it was a core windows component.

So if a repair tool... which uses a SP1 disk... "repairs" a SP2 machine... wont it see some of the SP2 dlls as "incorrect" and so replace them with old SP1 versions?

So back to the question....again in my original post "was this almost inevitable?" that I would end up with a mess?

Cheers
P.S. My wifes machine was/is Vista 64bit... so SP2.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

If you use a backlevel disk to do a repair install you will cause a situation where there are files from 2 different Service Pack levels mixed. There will also be registry entries that don't belong to the downleveled version. This is a totally unsupported configuration and there's no wonder you had problems. You can slipstream SP2 and other updates (Google> "Vista slipstream")

 

[yoji]

If you use a backlevel disk to do a repair install you will cause a situation where there are files from 2 different Service Pack levels mixed. There will also be registry entries that don't belong to the downleveled version. This is a totally unsupported configuration and there's no wonder you had problems. You can slipstream SP2 and other updates (Google> "Vista slipstream")

Thank you.. so I was right... it was inevitable I would have problems... SSSoooooo...

Whats the official Microsoft solution? I bought Vista with SP1 was current... and I upgraded to SP2.... but Vista does not have the "create a restore disk" option like Win 7...... and Microsoft will not allow me to download a Vists SP2 install disk ISO (as a consumer..) ....

So where does that leave me the next time?

Cheers

 

[ex_bubblehead]

As I said. Google "vista slipstream" and you'll get all the instructions you need to create an up to date Vista install disk.