WinXP SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED installation fix
I got a Blue Screen Of Death with the error SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED while trying to set up a clean install of WinXP this evening.
This install repeatedly failed after the Windows Setup finished loading after booting from CD-ROM, and just before it would have presented the text welcome screen.
The problem turned out to be small smudges on the CD surface. Apparently, SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED can be triggered by a failed read while booting the installation environment.
Other posts I found online reported this being caused by loose drive cables, conflicting IDE drive cables, bad CD-ROM drives, as well as damaged or smudged installation media.
I wasted half an hour reseating cables and memory chips and fishing around with Google for a solution.
Hopefully this will save someone some search time.
July 16th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
[…] The past few days I’ve been setting up a clean install of Windows XP on a generic PC. Aside from figuring out the mysterious installation failure which turned out to be due to smudges on the retail media, it’s been taking a while to get a basic load of software together. […]
August 9th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Just to let you know that the problem source “smudge on media” is real, and causes this error.
i guess a “proper” description for this error code would be “we cant access some file on the installation media, please check everything”
August 9th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Gilrim,
Agree that unreadable media is a good reason to fail the installation, but it would probably help a lot of people if it had more graceful and informative user feedback than the BSOD that’s displayed now. There have been a lot of people finding this post in search of a fix for “WinXP SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”. Most retail users probably won’t know to search online for a fix, either.
September 17th, 2006 at 1:49 am
Thanks for posting this. You just saved me some aggravation I am sure:)
December 14th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
I just received this error last night. I’ve been getting the error about every two weeks or so. I leave my machine on pretty much all day too. Anyway, after doing another update, I get this error message. I usually just break out the bootdisk and reghost my machine with my latest image.
This approach beginning to be time consumming. So I don’t know if I have a failed hard drive or something else. It was running just fine and I was in the middle up upgrading my divx codecs once again to 6.4.
Freaking windows!! I’m looking for a fix now. Before I have to reghost and lose a weeks worth of data. POS XP!!
December 31st, 2006 at 1:17 am
I have this problem now as well, and it’s not due to the CDROM - I was not installing windows, mine just refuses to boot from the hard drive, it gets a far as showing the loading XP screen then reboots, I have tried a different hard drive which I know has a good working installation on, and I still get the BSOD.
I have disconnected everything on the mobo and even tried a different graphics card and IDE cable, so I think its a mother board problem.
January 18th, 2007 at 6:38 am
On a Duron 1600 machine with a properly installed XPPro-Sp1 (upgraded from W98), I could not IN ANY WAY go beyond the Session3_Initialisation_failure for an clean install, booting from CD. I tried: new memory, new cddrive, new HD, change hdcable from UltraATA to std, change cdrom to other channel, change 3 different XPPro-SP2 cd’s.
UNTIL THIS: Switched to CDrom XPHome-SP1… No Problems ! ( except that I have no licence key for it….) Would try XPPro-Sp1, if I can find one
April 13th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I just had this problem too. (thanks for keeping this blog post up!)
Turns out I had a power cord going a front-panel that was suppoesd to have a sound card installed on the mobo as well. i pulled out the connection and next attempt it worked.
it seems like xp will throw this error if *anything* is wrong with the install procedure at all. bad error messaging but at least its reliable.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:55 am
i recieved this message after a year of working xp. nothing to do with instalation. i think my hard drive,cd, has bust or a connection somwhere has fallen out
August 27th, 2007 at 10:02 am
The first post is awesome.got a new motherboard installed i cleaned the disk.made sure everything was connected and atm everything is looking gd on the install.Thx for the post.u dont know how crazy those blue screens get me.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Yeahppp… Once more, I have a Sony PCG-C1XS laptop. I needed to instal XP PRO, but, since it doesn’t have a built-in CD-ROM or floppy drive. I have an external floppy and CD-ROM that can be plugged into USB. This laptop is very small, so it has only one USB. The CD-ROM has a USB to ATAPI converter. I can boot from the floppy, but not from the CD-ROM for some reason (checked the bios and boot sequence is ok). After 4 days working this… Finally I got to transfer my XP CD files in the drive on a second partition and running the instalation just to get the da*&% “SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED” error… 3 times using different methods. Just to figuring out the installation failure turned out to be the XP CD…It had a scratch…
September 14th, 2008 at 9:19 am
hey, i get this problem as well. i just installed new ram and now i get this BSOD. it happens when i try to boot xp from harddrive. when i try a re-install from cd, it says there is no harddrive, although the BIOS recognizes it….
i guess i’ll have to get a new HD?