VISTA 'installing service pack: stage 3 of 3 0% complete....(5 hours and counting!)

candygurl

HI all.
tearing my hair out. i'm installing the windows vista service pack for a friend on their laptop, and it's been stuck at installing stage 3 of 3 0% complete for hours and hours, but says do not turn off your computer, so i have not.

it seemed to be complete after the first bit last night, and returned after some time to the login screen, and , then went on to 'configure updates' and is now installing and has been at stage 3 for about the past 4 hours.

is this normal?
i also noticed when i got back in briefly that it didnt find any wireless network, we work on a router here, and my connection, as you can see, is fine.

any suggestions would be great. many thanks.
cg

aliEnRIK

No its not normal (Clearly)

You have no option but to kill the power and reboot and see what happens

Id hazard a guess that something else is conflicting with it (Comodo defense, Spybot tea timer or whatever)

candygurl

hi. thanks for the advice. ok i did that, goes straight back into installing service pack stage 3 of 3 0% complete...

it's a fairly new laptop and he has not installed any spybot or anything though he does have norton internet serurity on there, and it's out of date. would that be a problem? he installed another 'avast' internet security instead, and was going to try (again) to get norton off it when this thing had updated.

cg

ms_fan

Stage 3 on Vista/2K8 is the configuration after the installing - updating files that were locked during the install and making various changes.

The following link should help you, to roll back.

support.microsoft.com/kb/949358

aliEnRIK

Im not sure id want to try microsofts advice from that link with it being a service pack

Reboot and keep pressing F8 to get into SAFE MODE WITH NETWORKING

Uninstall AVAST and use the Norton removal tool
http://service1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039

Reboot and see what happens then

ms_fan

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Im not sure id want to try microsofts advice from that link with it being a service pack

Reboot and keep pressing F8 to get into SAFE MODE WITH NETWORKING

Uninstall AVAST and use the Norton removal tool
ervice1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039

Reboot and see what happens then

Aknowledged, and normally I would agree but KB937287 is a pre-requisite to SP1 for Vista so if it was being installed, this was likely installed first and could be the cause of the error.