Hi....and....HELP! My Win2000 Pro won't start up as I continue to get an error message stating that ..\system32\ntoskrnl.exe file is missing or corrupt. I try to boot and repair from the CD, but I still get this error. FYI: :-( I have no emergency boot disk). I've checked, and the file is there. It's too large a file to copy from another system onto a disk in my A drive. Any ideas how I can get past this?

Hi Mary, This can be a scary one, for sure! Has anything changed about your system recently? Hardware/software installs? OS upgrade? Can you boot to safe mode? If so, you should have a look at your boot.ini file. Assuming that W2K is installed on the first partition of the (C: drive), on the only (or first)physical IDE harddisk, and firther assuming that this is the only OS you're running, boot.ini will say: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) In my experience, an error in boot.ini is the cause of the majority of these errors. Just to clarify: when you attempt a "repair installation" from the CD, the same error appears before the process completes? Feel free to email me if I can be of further assistance...my knowledge is limited, but I'd be glad to help. Roger

Could be your ARC/path statment in the boot.in is no longer pinting to correct location for ntoskrnl.exe? Quite why this would happen...? Check out this M$ KB item: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q153973&ID=KB;EN-US;Q153973 It contains another lnk which may be the one that will actually get you going again...? W2K Repair 'tuts.'in case they are of help: http://is-it-true.org/nt/nt2000/atips/atips71.shtml http://www.rambuk.dk/info/using_the_recovery_console.htm i.e. Q121517 BTW - you don't need an ERD; it's just a little eaasier... if you have one. Nontheless it would be good/wise to make one and keep it up-to-date when you do get back in?

Just noted that somehow the KB Q item managed to get separate from the X reference... Text should have been It contains another link which may be the one that will actually get you going again...? i.e. Q121517

Hi all, I have the same problem with the Ntoskrnl.exe I can't boot in safe mode or from cd-rom. How can I get in and edit the boot.ini file? I need acces to this computer. Please help.

Yeh, got the same problem. Installed W2K on a separate partition than that of XP. W2K loads up fine, but XP now has missing ntoskrnl. I installed W2K after XP - XP not quite there yet!!

I am running Win XP and I too have the same problem. It causes my pc to sometimes not boot up, or if it does it doesn't allow me to type. As i have a password on my admin account, I can't get in to remove/fix the file cause I can't type in my password. I have fixed this twice now, the first time i removed my harddrive and put it in another machine and copied the file accross by booting off the other pcs HDD, this fixed the problem for about 3 hours then bang it happened again, so this time i formatted the HDD and reinstalled windows, but under FAT32 file system instead of NTFS. This solved the problem for about half a day and now i am stuck again, I am no longer getting the error message about ntoskrnl.exe but I know its possibly causing the problem, and i can't bloody type! I thought the fresh install would fix it so silly me put a password on again, so can't get into fix it, and now my machine is really annoying cause it doesn't recognise the keyboard at all, ie: I can't even get into bios by pressing delete.