Two days ago, I got a blue screen of death (BSOD) on my W2K laptop. Well, I have tried everything and so far I have not been able to bring it back to life.

I have tried the repair command multiple times, all with the same result.

Unfortunately, I do not have a backup of any sort and this laptop contains my life.

The error message that I am getting is that the file below is either missing or corrupted.

winnt\system32\config\system\

  • ntuskrnl.exe
  • hal.dll
  • bootvid.dll
  • config\system.alt


I am assuming that the files listed above are all part of the components in the config\system\ directory.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude with 1 GB RAM.

I have the Dell Reinstallation CD W2K+SP3 CD and on the off chance that I could reinstall without disturbing anything else, I tried that route. I discovered that I have 3 partitions, which are

  • unamed -- 8 MB
  • NTFS -- 50+ GB
  • xx don't remember the name of this partition -- 31 GB


So I decided to try to reinstall W2K in the unnamed partition. The message that I got was that I needed roughly 800 MBs to re-install W2K, so I gave up on that idea.

While I am an expert in many areas of computing, for all practical purposes, I am a newbie when it comes to Microsoft operating systems and how they work or how to fix them.

Which is why I am coming to you, virtualdr experts, to hopefully find a solution to my problem.

I also have a copy of W2K Customer Support and Diagnostics Tools but until I can get the system to boot up, I am stuck.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,

Linda