i have a laptop that runs on XP, and i recently upgraded to SP2 from SP1.
after installation and restart, blue screen stop error came up with 00000019 BAD POOL HEADER and i cant boot into normal mode, so i accidentally went for the last known good configuration, but i forgot that i cant use that right after an SP2 upgrade, and this is where i think the problem is, the last known good probably restored my system and registry to SP1 stuff.
symptoms:
right now i can barely boot into safemode, it first takes a long time to load even the login screen, after i login, icons appear but no start menu or taskbar, taskmanager also shows blank under the user column, i know this is caused by the terminal service not being started, after checking with eventvwr, services and msconfig, i realized that the 2 required services for SP2, RPC and DCOM server process launcher would not start (it stays in pending to start mode forever) and therefore other services wont start and i cannot launch most of the other applications. cant use remove programs to remove SP2 because it halts in the middle of checking configuration (possibly due to the lack of the required services), the only system tool that is fully functional now is regedit(fortunitely). i know i can use the recovery console, but unfortunitely my rom drive on the laptop is broken so repair disk is not an option, ive already tried to install recovery console with "winnt32.exe /cmdcons" but it came up saying im using a newer version of windows (SP2) than it would allow me. so now i cant uninstall SP2, and safemode is heavily crippled, cant use system restore or anything, explorer cant even open windows properly, normal mode cant start with the STOP error. and i hv no access to cdrom
i want to know if theres a way to force an install of the recovery console, or a way to forcefully uninstall SP2, or at least a way to start my safemode normally, or any other possible ways to fix this problem, if i can do any of these i can fix the rest myself, thx alot of any help