I have a laptop running nt4.0. when i boot i get this error. windows nt could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt \system32\ntoskrnl.exe please reinstall a copy of the above file. how can i do this?

ntoskrnl.exe is everything, pretty much the "guts" of NT. You either have to have an Emergency Recovery Disk, or reinstall NT from scratch.

It could be that BOOT.INI is pointing to the wrong load partition. As the file is plain text you can boot from a DOS diskette and edit it. Here is an example: [boot loader] timeout=10 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WTSRV [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WTSRV="Windows Terminal Server Version 4.00" multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WTSRV="Windows Terminal Server Version 4.00 [VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos C:\ = "MS-DOS" Look at the [operating systems] part. These lines are the startup menu that NT produces during the boot up process. You have obviously got this far as NTLDR goes next. The thing to check is the value in brackets after the word 'partition', in this case it is 3. This is because the system has a DELL diagnostic partition, a C: (DOS) and a D: (NT) partition. The (3) tells to bootstrap to find NTLDR on partion 3 which is the D: drive. So the value to go in the brackets will depend on you particular system. If there is a diagnostic partition it will be No1, then comes C: as No2 then D: as No3 etc. If you expect to boot all of NT from the C: partition then the value should be 1 if you haven't got a diagnostic partition. I hope this makes sense.