Dont do what i did.

[Zelda]

What ever you do, I found out Uninstalling SP3 for XP iS BAD!!
It makes a Memery Leak that crash's your system in 78 hours, My hard drive fried it self and i am in the middle of rebuildin my PC. Thank god only the hard drive failed....Draw back is i lost all my homework vidios..

'*crys*

 

[Havegooda {A|R}]

...HOW do you uninstall SP3? Srsly, I've never heard of that.

Why would it fry your HDD...worst thing that it could do would be to corrupt your bootloader and/or OS.

~Gooda~

 

[HardHat]

Sounds like your components were beginning to show its age...

Never heard of software being uninstalled causing problems like that before.

 

[Zelda]

If you install the SP by updating instead of buying them preloaded on a PC you can remove them va the add/remove. What happend was it Created a Memery leak with in windows. As i was trying to fix that Leak on the last reboot the System over heated and the hard drive started to Smoke. The system just now boots over and over and over and wont go any father. What i did was riped o ut my old hard drive and tossed it in.

 

[trykael]

Alright - so just for clarity, uninstalling sp3 did NOT cause a fatal failure in your hard drive. HardHat is most likely correct - it is just a coincidence that in the act of uninstalling sp3 your HD decided to fail.

Now it is possible that you had some software troubles while uninstalling sp3 - I'm not going to dispute that. It's well documented that Microsoft's uninstall "feature" is sketchy at best, and leaves all sorts of piece lying around your computer. Everyone's situation varies a little (different software, different hardware, etc), so I don't doubt that part at all.

Anyway - the only reason I'm chiming in here is there's no reason to spread false information and cause massive panic ;-) Yes, uninstalling service packs may cause some software troubles, but it's not going to burn up your hard drive. Also, just because you had this problem does not mean it's going to happen to everyone else.

 

[DEMODER]

If the heat damage to your hard drive isn't too bad, the data on your hard drive might still be recoverable. I had a hard drive fail on me a few weeks ago, it was my storage drive I keep all kinds of stuff on, videos, drivers, patches, pictures, etc. I was pretty upset about it until I did some research and found this program called GetDataBack. It's expensive, but it recovered ALL my data from the corrupted and failing HD.

Here is the link to the website. The program lets you try it out first, so you don't have to buy it. It lets you run it to see if it can recover the data first, and if it can, you have to buy it to copy the files off.

One thing though, you need to know whether the HD was formatted as NTFS or fat32, because there is a different program for each type.

http://www.runtime.org/

 

[Havegooda {A|R}]

If the heat damage to your hard drive isn't too bad, the data on your hard drive might still be recoverable. I had a hard drive fail on me a few weeks ago, it was my storage drive I keep all kinds of stuff on, videos, drivers, patches, pictures, etc. I was pretty upset about it until I did some research and found this program called GetDataBack. It's expensive, but it recovered ALL my data from the corrupted and failing HD.

Here is the link to the website. The program lets you try it out first, so you don't have to buy it. It lets you run it to see if it can recover the data first, and if it can, you have to buy it to copy the files off.

One thing though, you need to know whether the HD was formatted as NTFS or fat32, because there is a different program for each type.

http://www.runtime.org/

I'm betting it was NTFS. FAT32 is usually reserved for REALLY low capacity HDDs and most flash drives (if not all).

~Gooda~

 

[MenOpaws]

If the heat damage to your hard drive isn't too bad, the data on your hard drive might still be recoverable. I had a hard drive fail on me a few weeks ago, it was my storage drive I keep all kinds of stuff on, videos, drivers, patches, pictures, etc. I was pretty upset about it until I did some research and found this program called GetDataBack. It's expensive, but it recovered ALL my data from the corrupted and failing HD.

Here is the link to the website. The program lets you try it out first, so you don't have to buy it. It lets you run it to see if it can recover the data first, and if it can, you have to buy it to copy the files off.

One thing though, you need to know whether the HD was formatted as NTFS or fat32, because there is a different program for each type.

http://www.runtime.org/

I have to agree with the majority here that burning up that drive was not a result of uninstalling SP3 (why did you uninstall SP3 anyway?) There is a simple remedy for data loss, it's called "BACKUP". No excuse for not running backups, with the low price of external HDD these days (0.5Tb ~ $100 and even better deals for bigger drives)), probably cheaper than the software discribed above. And by the way, if your HD smoked as you wrote, most likely this software isn't going to do you any good, but if the trial is free, it won't hurt to try.

 

[weeds]

ya I unistalled sp3 from a homebuild and updates through windows update to get sp3 no problems even did It on my eee 1000H it came with sp3 and I took sp3 out and I didnt fry the harddrive that guy is talking BS. This message is aimed at CampingCarl. AND THAT SHOT HIT HIM LOL people should not post fualty information if you have proof of that happening send a picture or the link to it.