ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupt (Windows 2000)

[CondorMan]

Hi everyone

A colleague (no, not me!!) has Windows 2000 and he has had this error message when he tried to boot his laptop. We managed to get into DOS and found a couple of copies of the file which we copied to a new temporary directory (following renaming the files to prevent conflict) and then we overwrote each original file with the other, in sequence, and tried to reboot. No luck.

I suspect that the boot.ini may be corrupt but don't know what should be in it. So far as I'm aware, there are no partitions on the hard drive. He doesn't have a Windows 2000 installation disc as the laptop came with Windows 2000 pre-installed. The disc which came with it will, we assume, reformat the hard drive, reinstall Windows 2000, overwrite his data and take the laptop back to "factory status". Any ideas how we could find out what should be in the boot.ini? We don't have another computer which is running Windows 2000 from which we might copy the file so we're stuck.

I know there have been other threads about this and one poster gave details of what is in the XP Pro boot.ini. My own system is that, so I can confirm what was written is in my own boot.ini. I've not been able to find explicit information about what should be in the Windows 2000 boot.ini.

Thanks for your time and patience.

 

[htmlman]

This is what is in my boot.ini file for my win 2000
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

 

[CondorMan]

Many thanks. We'll have a go to rewrite or edit boot.ini using "Edit" via DOS. We have nothing to lose!