I'm afraid this is about the nearest heading for this particular enquiry.

I'm using Win2K Pro/Sp2 on a standalone machine. Initially, after OS installation, I noticed some serious errors logged in Event Viewer. I thought nothing of it but later realised that, after installing SP2 (off a freebie CD), I have classic symptoms of the cache write-back problem. SP2 (as installed by yours truly straight after Win2K) doesn't update classpnp.sys and disk.sys, with the result that, on the first few reboots, hard disk corruptions can occur.Even now, I'm getting warnings in Event Viewer about possible hard disk corruptions.

Microsoft publish an article on this at http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;q281672&FR=1. They suggest that a separate fix is obtainable but I've tried asking them and I get no reply.

Why doesn't my SP2 update those two files to at least 3490 and 3596? Do I need to download and install SP2 specifically from Microsoft's site? I notice that there you download first an exec program, then SP2 itself.

Others I've discussed this with mention an 'integrated' install of Win2K/SP2 but what's published at www.ntcompatible.com/content.php?page_id=15 concerning that is hideously complex. I can't believe you need to do all that just to properly install SP2.

Is there a pre-SP3 hotfix for the cache write-back problem?