Major Fubar !!

[welshgasman]

Hi,

My faithful old Celeron had a major seizure when I got back off holiday.
It came up Primary disk failure,Secondary disk failure. I thought maybe the controller had packed up on the m/b, but testing the disks on a USB to IDE lead, they were both u/s.

My primary drive was C: & D: both of 425MB for historical reasons.
My secondary drive was a 160GB split into 40GB 40GB & 80GB as E: F: & K:

C: & D: are hardly ever used now, so I quickly restored those from an Acronis Image backup I had for both partitions to an old 4GB drive I had as 2 *2GB. I sent off the Seagate drive for replacement as it was under warranty and repartitoned it as the old one. I do not have an Acronis backups for the other drives (well current at least) but weekly back them up fully with Ntbackup weekly and differentially daily.

However restoring all 3 partitions and system state gives me errors that NTOSKRNL is missing or corrupt in systemroot\system32. It is there, so must be corrupt as far as windows is concerned. Tried copying it from another PC, then got HAL.DLL did not match NTOSKRNL. Tried copying both, no luck.

Windows will find the installation on E: with the recovery console, but not when trying to repair. Boot.ini is pointing to the correct partition on the correct drive.

As this PC has grown over the years the amount of stuff installed on it is huge, but I *thought* my backups would save me, but apparently not.

Does anyone have any tips on how to get it all back running please.? For now I have installed a second windows installation on D: so as to be able to access the ntbackup on the PC itself rather than vis USB to IDE lead.

I need to find out what files w2k expects to be aligned as I have several NTOSKRNL.EXE files in various folders with different dates, or get it to state that it will recognise a repair. I am using a slipstreamed W2KSP4 disk.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

[mgmcc]

Which drive are you trying to boot from? If you boot from "C" and have restored an Acronis image of your old "C" drive to a replacement drive, it should boot with all of the necessary files in place. However, if the BIOS has become confused by you changing the hardware for both drives, it may actually be trying to boot from the wrong hard disk and this is why you're getting the "NTOSKRNL is missing or corrupt" error. If this is the case, change the order of the drives in the BIOS settings for the boot device sequence.

[welshgasman]

Hi Mike,

I boot from C: which is still FAT. Boot.ini and NTLDR are on C:. I had to run FIXBOOT and FIXMBR to get that to boot regardless of the image. I've seen BOOTCFG mentioned on the net, but my Recovery Console does not have that command.?

I've shut it down for the night now, , but according to boot.ini my new install is Multi(0) rdisk(0) partition(2) which equates to the current E: and
Multi(0) rdisk(1) partition(1) which equates to the current D:
(this is from memory at the moment)

It is a little confusing as D: and E: have been swapped as far as drive letters go, but not physical positions.
I know this, as I name the partitions after the original drive letter, so K: is called KDrive. Somehow the second partition on the first drive is currently E: and not Dwhich it used to be) despite being named Ddrive and vice versa for Edrive (D which is the first partition on the second disk with all 3 partitions set as primary.

I'll start afresh anew tomorrow, it has been a long day. :-(

I was going to leave the drive letters until it was all working, if it ever does. :-)

Thanks for replying.

[welshgasman]

Ok, a check to what I have already.
Boot.ini is
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microso ft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="D Drive Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="MS-DOS"

It has changed slightly from last night as I tried to install a fresh copy of W2k to the Edrive which is the 1st partition on the second drive.Windows moved this entry from the second to the top for reboot, but failed with "inaccessible boot device".

Disk manager shows
Disk 0 C: Cdrive, system, FAT, Primary
E: Ddrive, boot, NTFS, Primary
Disk 1 D: Edrive, Page,NTFS,Primary
F: Fdrive, NTFS, Primary
K: Kdrive, NTFS, Primary

Tried copying HAL.DLL and NTOSKRNL.EXE from new minimum working install to the Edrive, but got the error message "Load needed dlls for kernal".

That is when I decided to try a new install to Edrive, where it found folder WINNT and deleted all the files, and then copied over the new ones.
One minute it cannot detect a windows system other than this fresh install, so it cannot repair, the next when to try to install, it tells you a windows system already exists, continuing will delete the files, which is OK, as I can get them back from backup.

Not sure how to progress with this to be honest.

This site has removed the spaces from the disk manager entries, so it is a little untidy, sorry.

[welshgasman]

Update for any other poor soul who gets into this situation.

FWIW I could not get windows to change the drive letters whilst restoring. The machine is so historic I cannot remember how they got that way as its birth was in MSDOS and windows assigns driver letters differently.

Tried restoring old ATI images and then refreshing with ntbackup files, but still got ptoblems with ntoskrnl.exe with fltmgr.sys and load dlls message.

Started again this morning with partitioning and formatting both drives with c: as MSDOS bootable. D: as logical, and ALL the partitions on the second drive as logical. This gave me C, D, E & F in the correct order. K I changed later.

Installed w2k to E: and then used ntbackup to restore all of E and system state.
Rebooted and it still works, but with all my programs.
Restored the other drives, leaving boot.ini and a few other files as they were just in case.

At present all appears to be working (fingers crossed).
A lot of hard work, and I do not mind admitting I was thinking of starting from scratch again (the PC could probably do with it, but I'm a stubborn so and so).

I dare say I might find a few glitches, but most appears to be working fine, fingers crossed.

So the moral of the story is, even with plenty of backups, it can still be a pain depending on what went bad, but boy I am so relieved. :-)