I have a Dell Studio 1535 laptop that I installed Server 2008 onto. There are no Dell utilities installed (only the drivers). Everything worked great for about a month, then I got randy and installed Hyper-V, discovered that it didn't support USB, and decided that I would remove it. BIG MISTAKE. Now my machine is hosed. When I rebooted after queueing the uninstall for Hyper-V, it started with the updates, and never got past step 3 of 3 - 76%. Here's where I am so far: - I read some related articles about an HP machine and their vendor products causing this, but mine's a Dell and I did a fresh operating system install so there's no Dell paraphenalia installed. - I tried to boot to command prompt, but that 'update progress' virus takes over and I never get the chance to type anything- I tried booting from the installation disk, but lo and behold, it gives me an I/O error, informing me that I either pulled out a USB device too soon (not), or that one of my devices is failing (which is extremely unlikely to happen at the exact same moment that I blow up my operating system with a known issue).I'm also not entertaining the notion that my hard drive is on the blink because of the following:- I extracted my hard-drive from the laptop and hooked it up to my other laptop (love USB SATA!). I can now peruse the so-called dysfunctional device. There was another article that suggested I remove all $NT prefixed files from the Windows directory, but alas, there were none to be found (even when I turn on the hidden and system stuff).- Thought about booting up on the other laptop to do a system recovery to this drive, but the server 2008 I have is 64 bit, and my el cheapo laptop is only 32-bit :(So, I think I'm on the right path. I now have access to the contents of the hard drive. Does anybody know what files need to be obliterated in order for me to be able to boot up again? Any other ideas?Thanks in advance,SeanSean

Hi Sean, The following post discussed the similar issue to yours, hope it helps, you can refer to: Windows Server 2008 Locks up "Configuring Updates" after Hyper-V Removal (non HP computer) http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/106471aa-cc0e-40c8-b5c1-d863bb8e2aed Server 2008 in Virual PC - doesn't start after Autoupdate http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/2a2ddf5f-4f63-4b83-9f8e-ace11f93a22c Best regards, Vincent Hu