WARNING about removing the SP1 Beta uninstall Information to free up disk space

From Microsoft TechNet Forum

There are some recent Blog posts that describe a command that will completely remove all of the uninstall information for the Service Pack 1 Beta to free up some disk space. Some of these blog posts do not go far enough when describing the consequences of using this procedure.

Please remember that if you have the Service Pack 1 Beta installed on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, that you will be Required to uninstall the SP1 Beta before you can install the Final (RTM) version of SP1 when it is released.

Just to be perfectly clear, if you use that command to remove the SP1 Beta Uninstall information, you will be required to completely reinstall Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, or use a complete System Image Backup, created prior to installing the SP1 Beta, before you can install the Final (RTM) version.

Please consider this information carefully before using that command.

Regards,


Ronnie Vernon MVP
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I thought some folks here would find this useful. ~Nibs

Very useful

Perhaps this could very usefully moved to Nibs other linked post, showing the removal hack?

I think I will if Nibs doesn't mind me moving it.

No problems on my end, besides you're the Moderator, I'm just a mere VIP with over 3,000 posts.

I have not found the "command" the blog was referring to though that causes this problem, at least not yet.

I don't doubt Ronnie, he usually gets it right. But he should point out that many cleaning programs will do the same thing. The link you gave in your post will, I believe, produce the problem. But, guessing, I would say one way out of the predicament might be to reinstall the RC/Beta, and then uninstall the correct way?

I used the normal procedure to uninstall the beta SP, and 7 wouldn't even boot afterwards. It took a long time uninstalling (over an hour) then rebooted, the progress was showing 100%, then a final reboot, and no go. Even the repair option didn't work.

Fortunately, the OS (7 Ultimate x64) was an evaluation version, so no harm was done. But I've decided to stay away from future beta (and RC) service packs from that point forward. There's no point in risking this, unless you have an OS to play with, and you want to have an active part in testing.

The last two beta offerings that M$ has released (the beta SP & IE9 beta) didn't uninstall well for me. Therefore, I won't mess with anymore of their offerings, although I will give the next version of Windows a shot, as I want to see what I'm getting into before I buy.

Cat

Cat - it shouldn't take an hour to uninstall, my system only took about 15 minutes.

Once the final RTM SP1 comes out in the 1st Quarter of 2011 you'll be fine with it.

Remember your system is basically a laptop system mimicking an Apple iMac, the Athlon dual core CPU is a lot slower that the current CPUs out there, plus it's a mobile type CPU using less wattage which means it's slower that a conventional desktop setup

It's only a 1.5 GHz clock speed... in today's terms and compared to desktop systems it's not a speed demon for sure. Quite poky to be honest.

When the final release is here, I'll install SP1, but I don't see the need to install the RC, only to have to uninstall it prior to installing the "real SP1".

Hopefully, in the spring I can upgrade my processor. There's a couple of options, but I must be careful, and at this time of the year, money's tight. That's fine, because I'll have more time to figure which to go with. Just any won't do in my case. There's only three or four options, at the max.

I noticed that when I went with a 1TB drive, installing and uninstalling takes a little longer, even though the hard drive has a larger (32MB) cache. The drive speed is the same. But the main partitions (approx 450GB each) are much larger than any that I've ever had.

Cat

In agreement with Nibs on the uninstall. I have done it a few times now, with the Beta and the RC. This is on a fairly old laptop used expressly for test purposes. !.66 CPU and 2gbs Ram. Tops for an uninstall, Desktop back to desktop, is 15 minurtes.