Hatbat said:
Against my better judgement I recently installed the SP2. My system completly
locked up and after powering down I have been upable to access my hard drive.
If I let it boot normally, my system gets to the XP "load" screen and then
auto reboots. I can not acces safe mode to run system restore. I turned off
the "auto restart" feature and I get "The application failed to start because
winsrv was not found." I have no idea what Im doing at this point. Any words
of wisdom???!?!
Did it lock up during the SP2 install process? If so, SP2 is probably not
installed properly and will have to be removed and re-installed. To do
this, you enter the Recovery Console via an XP CD and run a few commands.
Your system may have the Recovery Console installed to the drive, but if the
drive is messed up enough, that won't be helpful.
Yiou should install SP2, and the two most reliable ways to do this both
involve downloading the entire SP2 file. It's about 260 meg, so you might
need to download it on a high-speed system and burn it to CD.
One method involves you slipstreaming your XP CD with SP2, and then doing a
repair install. There's an excellent tool called Autostreamer for this.
The problem with this is that some XP CDs (from Dell, for example) do not
allow slipstreaming. The other is that if you have a recovery program
rather than an install CD, you can't slipstream that.
So method 2 is simply running the SP2 install from the file you downloaded.
Both of these are much more reliable than doing the online update. In
either case, you will still have to go online to get the 70+ other updates
after SP2.
Get the SP2 file here:
http://tinyurl.com/5bobl
(this is a microsoft site)
And here is how to remove the failed SP2 install:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875355
To make this one work, you need a bootable XP CD or bootable Linux/XP
Recovery CD with NTFS support so you can get into the recovery console. If
you don't have one, you can use *any* bootable XP CD that you can borrow -
Home or Pro, makes no difference.
HTH
-pk
