URGENT -- W2K Pro has crashed

[LindaHewitt]

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

[lgbpop]

The unnamed partition is most likely a recovery image that's accessed by a semi-secret key input (i.e., Ctrl + F10). That'll be protected from over-writing. You don't want to use that unless you're desperate; you'd lose all your personal files.

A Dell operating system disk is not a recovery disk in the same sense as a Compaq or HP disk. It's a proprietary version of Windows specially written to work with the Dell BIOS. You should be able to boot from that disk and do a repair install, or run SFC. You'd better have SP4 handy to add immediately, though, if you do an over-the-top type of install. An alternative plan would be to install Windows in the 31GB partition so you can go recover your files from the 50GB partition. When that's done, try to fix the Windows install on your main (50GB) partition.

You can also try booting from a Linux live CD (Ubuntu and Knoppix are good ones for this) and mounting the Windows drive so you can recover your personal files to CD/DVD before trying to repair Windows.