The first service pack for Windows 7 has been available for nearly a month at this stage and by and large I think the roll out went without too many problems for most users. That was until today when I stumbled across a post on The Register.
Apparently a rake of “fatal errors” are hampering Windows 7 computers that have been updated since Microsoft released the first service pack. There are plenty of cases on forums where Windows 7 PC’s are booting with error messages and many users have had to rebuild their machines.
One Register reader, who has seen the errors appear on 15 machines had this to say;
Basically, if you have an OEM machine connected to a server running WSUS [Windows Server Update Services] with the default settings it offers and installs SP1 automatically. This is killing machines and stopping them booting with a C00000034 fatal error
He also adds that Windows 7 SP1 deletes all restore points on your machine just before it begins to install, so you have no recovery points.
Some users have also reported falling into a reboot loop and encounter the error message Error C000009A applying update operation 120782 of 367890.
The Microsoft forums and message boards have plenty to report on these issues which you can see
here and
hereDespite all these complaints, Microsoft still hadn’t figured out where it all went wrong until a couple of days ago. They’ve since issued a
fix which will hopefully solve the error code 0xc0000034.
Microsoft really want to be careful with this situation. They really should have tested Windows 7 SP1 in all situations to make sure nothing like this would have occurred. I feel they may have been rushing it out and that could have caused some of these slip ups. There’s no point in rushing out a first service pack if it’s just going to cause trouble, but I believe that reports like this can often be blown out of proportion somewhat.
