Dustin Patterson's Blog

I originally came across the above error when I was removing a virus from an individual’s computer.  The virus I was removing was known as one of the Facebook viruses.  The way the virus is spread is when an individual clicks on a link in a message that they received from a Facebook friend.  When they click the link, it bring them to a YouTube lookalike and asks them to download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.  Of course, the file that they are download is not Flash Player, but indeed a virus.

In this specific case, the user received an email from Facebook stating that they detected that their Facebook account was used to spread the virus, and gave the user information on removing the virus.  Their instruction were very successful overall.

When I received the users computer, I noticed that Windows Updates were not on, and the computer was very out-of-date.  I downloaded Windows XP Service Pack 3 and began the installation.  About half way through, I received the following error:

“Access is Denied” error when installing Windows XP Service Pack 3

I used my friendly search engine, Google to find the solution.

The above error occurs when there are incorrect Registry permissions on the computer.  In reading further, I found that although I was using Administrator access, the registry permissions were independent of that.  Microsoft provided a Knowledge Base article which game the necessary information to reset the Registry permissions.

1. Download this file (from Microsoft’s servers)

This will install the necessary back end for the next step.

2. Copy and paste the following into a new text file and name it reset.cmd

cd /d “%ProgramFiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools”
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

3. Save the file, reset.cmd, to the Desktop.

4. Double-click the file.  This may take a while to run, so be patient.

5. When it is finished, restart your computer for good luck and you should be able to install Service Pack 3 without any problems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Software, Technical Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.