Uninstalling Vista SP1 RC on Lenovo OEM Vista Business?!?

[bill bolton]

I have been unisntalling the Vista SP1 RC form various ThinkPad system in preparationf or loading up the SP1 RTM. Thsi has gone smoothly on all my installations for retail Vista Ultra images, but has come badly unstuck on my X61, which has a Lenovo OEM Vista Business (x86) on it

On the X61, the first two phases of the uninstall, during the shut down prior to reboot, went fine but the system would not load into the third phase of the uninstall after the reboot. Furthermore the Vista repair function never completes, depsite several attempts

Right now I'm facing a complete re-install of Vista Business!

Has anyone else had any experience, good or bad, with uninstalling the VIsta SP1 RC on any Lenovo OEM version of Vista?

Cheers,

Bill B.

[pae77]

No, but I think rather do a complete reinstall, you could do an "upgrade" repair with any x64 Vista installation disk.

I was having errors every time I tried to install SP1 on my Lenovo stock oem x64 vista machine and this procedure successfully fixed my system so that SP1 installed without errors.

What I did was use the tool that is floating around that allows you to back up and restore your oem vista activation key and then using a retail vista installation disk I was able to "obtain," I did the "upgrade" (repair) to the same x64 Vista Business I had my backed up oem license for. This sets your system back to an non-updated state. And then after restoring my activation and downloading and installing 44 windows updates, SP1 installed fine. And this procedure avoided my having to reinstall apps, data and most settings.

I did also use the MS beta registry hack after the upgrade (repair) to get the prerequisites for SP1 to install from windows update.

[erik]

bill, i have SP1 RC on my X61.   tonight i'll try to uninstall it and see what happens.

[bill bolton]

I ended up biting the bullet and doing a new install of Vista Business x86 from the recovery area... it gave me a chance to see what the "select features" aspect of that type of recovery install actually does

I then put the x86 SP1 RTM on before doing anything else, and after that ran Windows Update to see what it found.... apart from all the language packs (which I don't need) and a Defender signature update, it basically found nothing to left to update at that time!

Cheers,

Bill B.

[pae77]

Interesting. I guess SP1 really brings you up to date at the present time.