I’ve upgraded a few handfuls of vista systems to SP1 already and haven’t had a single issue yet, but I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later.  My first error/problem system came with a Sony Vaio laptop.   After the initial reboot, it immediately received a missing/corrupt ACPI.SYS error.

I knew most likely it could be fixed by overwriting the file from a Vista dvd, but I googled it anyway and came across this blog post.   It had the directions to fix it.

http://blog.rogercavanagh.com/blog/_archives/2008/2/16/3526136.html

Here was the fix:

1. Insert the Vista installation DVD — in my case I used the Windows Anytime Upgrade DVD that I used to ugrade to Vista Ultimate.

2. Power off and then power on the PC. A message appears inviting you to press any key to boot from DVD — on mine a restart just restarted without offering DVD boot.

3. Once the DVD boot completes, you’re asked to specify Language, Time and Currency and Keyboard Format. Choose the the appropriate options and click [Next].

4. The next screen has an option to Install now and another to Repair your computer. Choose repair.

5. There is a message about searching for files, then a list of Windows installations is displayed. I presume that, on multi-boot systems, more than one item would appear in this list. My laptop only had one that was already higlighted. Click [Next].

6. If you are offered any automatic repair options, cancel out of those until you get a screen that offers several choices beginning with Start Up Repair and ending with Command Prompt.

7. Choose Command Prompt. A window opens; on my PC the prompt showed the folder location was X:\Sources.

8. Enter cd \windows\system32\drivers. The prompt changes to reflect that location.

9. Enter c: to change to drive C; then cd \windows\system32\drivers. The prompt changes to reflect that location.

10. I did a back-up of all the files in the drivers folder before starting to copy by creating a new folder: md temp. Then copy c:\windows\system32\drivers\*.* c:\windows\system32\drivers\temp.

11. You can now copy files from the drivers folder in X. The simplest form is copy x:filename.

12.Type exit to close the command window and shut down or restart the PC with one of the command buttons offered.

The files that I copied were acpi.sys, atapi.sys, ataport.sys, battc.sys, compbatt.sys, intelide.sys, pciidex.sys and wmiacpi.sys. The info’ that I found also suggested mgahci.sys, but that wasn’t available on my system. I cannot testify to the completeness of this list. But, as I said in the post, it worked for me.

After performing these steps and rebooting, the Vista SP1 wizard continued with the update process and the SP1 installation was successful.