Well it seems that my problem may be caused by Tune up utilities 2006. It was probably messing some registry value, which I found the hard way. And since Windows is a tangle of inter-dependencies at the level of the (badly designed) monolithic kernel, it became inexplicably crippled. But since I wasn't wise about the TuneUp Utilities causing trouble, I installed the software again after Event 1 and restarted Windows. There was the same olde problem staring bleakly at me. So I just popped-in the XP boot CD and started the installation.

But hey, if the setup was uneventful, there's no point in the post! All for no (obvious) reason, I had to restart the setup forever because of an angelic error dialog (more like a monologue) :

Fatal error:
Setup failed to install the product catalogs.
The signature for Windows XP professional upgrade is invalid. The error code is 426. The service has not been started.

Microsoft support site reckons that it’s cause by a catalog folder left behind by the previous OS installation. So the support article asked me to press SHIFT+F10 at the error message to get a cmd prompt window. From here I am supposed to cd to windows\System32 and rename â€ï¿½Catroot2’ to â€ï¿½catold’. It’s cool to know that you can access cmd prompt from here. It isn’t very useful but at least it’s more functional and workable than the recovery console.

But the thing is, the time between the start of the â€ï¿½Installing windows’ mode (the shift+F10 trick starts to work only in this mode) and the appearance of the error dialog is about 10 seconds. I raced against the clock to delete/rename the damn catroot folder, but it was a no-go situation.

Tired of doing the catroot thing, I ran bootcfg.exe and lowered the amount of RAM visible to windows to only 128MB of the 1GB. Of course, I know this was a long shot and won’t work, but some setup related problems with lower versions of windows go away with this trick.

I tried to move some important files to my other partition. Next I tried running the setup.exe in the Windows setup CD from within the cmd window. And it launched the setup! But, unfortunately, the “child setupâ€ï¿½ also stopped at the same spot as it’s “parentâ€ï¿½, with the same error message.
In the end I had to do a quick format and fresh install like I did in my previous post. I could’ve avoided this format by deleting the entire partition of Windows related files, but it would’ve smelled like a boat-load of bilge water to find some file I forgot or something. This time around, I've steered clear of tuneup utilities. But how I miss it! But hopefully, this the end of my 'formatathon'.

PS: On google, as of this writing, my blog is the only hit for the word 'Formatathon' :)

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