I put together a new computer (described below) and at I couldn't get my copy of Windows XP Professional Update to install correctly. There were a couple problems. First, WinXP didn't know about the Serial ATA driver for my hard drive, so I had to load its driver on a floppy, and press F6 at the appropriate time during the WinXP boot sequence. Then, when I booted off of the CD and got part way through the installation, the following error came up on a blue screen of death page. 

SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

blah, blah, blah ... 

*** STOP: 0x0000006F (0xc0000020, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I found a guy on the web who had the same error message (he also had an S-ATA hard drive, and was trying to use a WinXP Pro upgrade). He said that he suspected that in his case it was a bad WinXP CD. When he replaced the CD, he claimed that it worked fine.

It appears that in my case (and possibly the above guy's case), the CD wasn't bad; the WinXP Pro upgrade installer is simply incompatible with at least some S-ATA drives. The solution (as described below) is not to do a clean install (as the documentation suggests), but to install Windows 2000 first and then upgrade to Windows XP. I deduced this after successfully installing WinXP Pro non-upgrade (but I wasn't able to complete the job since it wouldn't take my upgrade Product Key).

Here's the solution:

  • Install Windows 2000 on formatted drive.
  • Boot off of the WinXP Pro upgrade CD.
  • Be sure to use a floppy with the drivers for the Promise PDC20376 S-ATA/RAID controller card. Press F6 at the appropriate time in the boot sequence.
  • When installing WinXP Pro, make sure that you reformat the hard drive during the install process. Otherwise you'll have two operating systems on your hard drive--XP and 2000.

For Documentation purposes, the system that gave this error was:

  • Asus P4PE motherboard
  • Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz
  • 2x 512 MB DDR333, CL 2.5
  • Seagate 160 GB seral ATA (S-ATA) hard drive (ST3160023AS)