I've made a huge mistake, and upgraded the driver for my video card to the latest XP version, not 2k version. Now I constantly get 'stop' errors on bootup, and I can't access scanreg to restore the previous registry either: the windows folder is not listed in the DOS prompt, and it won't let me switch to other hard drives. Note: the prompt could only be brought up by the Win2k CD, since neither safe mode worked either. I'm running chkdsk, but don't know what else to do. How can this simple mistake cause so much trouble? Any thoughts on how I can access the registry...or anything?

It would help if you told us which video card you have & which driver you installed, but *usually*, 2K & XP drivers are one & the same. For example, nVidia lists their drivers as "Windows XP/2000": http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-...

Yes, you would think... but they aren't. This is for the 3DLabs Wildcat III 6110; the Win2k the driver is: wcgdrv_05050618.exe and for WinXP wcgdrv_06050618.exe I just realized that the OS is on an NTFS partition, so I'm having trouble just accessing it... Plus it turns out 2k doesn't have scanreg, only a \repair\regback folder with tons of files. This is ridiculous that it takes so much effort to fix this one silly mistake. Surely there is an easy way?...

I've never used this program, but I've seen it recommended in the forums several times before: http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm

Thanks for the link. I found that as well, and tried it out with a bunch of other similar software (NTFS4DOS, etc.). They do work very well, and I've now access to all the partitions and folders on the drive. But I can't undo the registry changes. There appears to be no :\WINNT\REPAIR\REGBACK folder, which would contain the registry backups, and would have to be copied to \SYSTEM32 to replace the bad registry. If this existed, I'd be done by now... So perhaps there were never registry backups created (this isn't my computer). Therefore I'm stuck. Anyone have thoughts?

The easiest way would be to swap video cards. Borrow a friends, grab an old one from an old computer or if your motherboard has onboard video, use that. Reinstall the driver, then switch back to your card. Make a bootable installation cd for the driver, if that's possible. If not, just burn the driver and install it in dos. You might have to burn the files unzipped (generally in an exe they're zipped), that way you can access them in dos. You'd have to copy them over the other files, but it could work and it can't do any harm. I'd try safe mode and things to that nature also, they might work. You might be able to disable or change something in bios to help, however, I doubt it.

Thanks for the great ideas! I like the idea of swapping cards. Anyone have thoughts on how to run a .exe from DOS? If they're compressed files, and an installer spits (potentially hundreds) of decompressed files and registry keys during installation, that's impossible to do by hand--if, in fact, it is even possible to find everything it changes, and copy those files/data onto a boot CD. There must be a way to run a .exe from a command line... Actually if there is, I could just run the *correct* video driver installation, which would over-write the bad one.