I applied today's updates to my Shuttle MiniPC running XP SP 2 and after the requisite reboot - it displays the low res XP loading screen then does a BSOD for not long enough to read, and the system reboots. I've tried all the modes - safe, last known good, etc. Nothing works.

I did empty the trash can while it was downloading the updates (but not while the updates were installing). I normally wouldn't do anything while downloading updates "cause I'm paranoid", but I didn't realize it had started the download. I noticed that the can was still "full" after I emptied it, so I tried again and it asked if I wanted to delete "SYSTEM". Uh oh. I opened the trash and it showed no files in the files list. I figured it would work itself out after the updates installed, and it was something the updater was doing with temp files.

I would recommend holding off on installing these updates for a few days to see if this is a reported problem out there. Oh, and blame google for the inset image - it was on the first page of the image search results - not my fault!

Update April 20, 2005:
I've been able to recover the disk enough to back up the data. The lesson is:

Do not automatically install windows updates. Once they are downloaded (if there are multiple), select each one individually, shut down your running applications and install each update one at a time. Before you install any of them - write down the issue hotfix numbers (KB*) so you can look it them up later should any hose your system on reboot.

Most of the Windows support sites I looked at recommended that you should not do anything else on your machine while updates are installing. I agree this sounds superstitious, but after nearly losing my data - I will follow this method. This didn't happen on any of my other machines, so I can only conclude that it was an interaction with something I was doing while the updates were happening. Read on for the gory details, and how this same hotfix hosed me on a second machine!

I've confirmed that this problem isn't just mine: Windows XP Newsgroups has several people with the same "blue screen after windows update" problem.

I did get it fixed (crosses fingers), but it was nastier than I expected. I first took the drive out, assuming it was simply an OS misconfiguration, so that I could back up my data off the drive in another machine. Turns out the disk structure was hosed, and the other XP machine wouldn't even recognize it was formatted!

So I dug around a bit and found how to uninstall a hotfix from the recovery console. The only problem was, since the filesystem was hosed, the recovery console only let me see C:\ - not C:\WINDOWS. The error was: "An error occurred during directory enumeration."

I looked around a bit more and found someone else who had run "chkdisk /r" from the console to repair the disk structure.

I fired this up, and it progressed normally for about 20 minutes, until it hit 50% - then it just sat there with the HDD light blinking. Was it doing something... or was it in click of death mode? After about 5 minutes, it hit 51%! Wow, maybe it's doing something. It's at least finding stuff on the disk!

I left it running overnight, and in the morning it said several problems were fixed. Not wanting the disk to become hosed again, I also uninstalled the KB893086 security update that caused the BSOD.

I found an article about how to uninstall microsoft hotfixes and security updates from the recovery console. This seemed to work - I can now boot into windows.

I'm currently backing up the entire drive, and will do a fresh install of the OS and apps. I think something is still wrong because my trash can icon shows files, but when I open it, it's empty. Actually, I'm waiting for XP64 to be released (come on - you said this month Microsoft) - I'll just move to that since I have to reinstall all my apps anyway.

Hopefully I've keyworded this post enough for other people to find it via search engine.

Evil Google, for inserting that image into our blog! I'm going to file a bug! Why wasn't this the first result? My PageRank-o-meter certainly puts it up there, so to speak.

I've updated the entry to reflect a solution. As a side note - on Monday I came in to find our Windows Server 2003 machine completely locked up. It did reboot succesfully after a hard reboot, and after looking through the logs I found that it had installed the same security update as listed above, auto-rebooted, and was not able to start up successfully. The machine was down all weekend. I immediately turned auto-update off (although it still checks to see if there are any updates). I will only install patches one at a time, and make sure I'm there to verify the machine will reboot afterwards.

Remember - even RAID5 won't help you if it's the OS that hoses the filesystem!

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