I’ve searched far and wide for an answer to this problem. I’ve got an armada m700 laptop with NT4...nothing special...one disk..about 20Gb/pIII/833mhtz…I think!! Been working fine for 3 years until I try to install the latest service pack coz of all the virus/spyware/trojan stuff...starting the thing gives the missing/corrupt ntoskrnl.exe message. I don’t have, much to my regret: 1. erd 2. nt4 cd's 3. a cdrom 4. backups 5. computer literacy I have tried, from a laptop with win2000: 1. Using the ntldr, ntdetect.com and a modified boot.ini, copy to a floppy and try to reboot dead comp..no joy 2. Ntrecover - no joy, as i don't know enough about the dead comp..ports, etc…then 3. creating 3 nt bootdisks – from bootdisk.com, choosing repair option - no joy….when booting dead machine it fails when looking for a cdrom 4. Dos 622 bootdisk+Ntsfdos...managed to get into the comp with a dos prompt and navigate...copied the original ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini to a floppy and booted from that..no joy....same outcome…missing/corrupt ntfskrnl.exe 4. tried changing values in the boot.ini(partition values of 0,1 and 2) on the floppy and rebooting, no joy From reading hundreds of posts i am inclined to think it has something to do with the “partition/7.8Gb thing/ntoskrnl.exe being outside partition...….” stuff. As a lot of posts contain an “fdisk” theme, I tried this, option 4, from the dos622 diskette, on the dead machine These are the values it reported Current fixed diskdrives=1 Partition=1 Status=A Type=hpfs Volume label= Mbytes=1151 system=0 Usage=100 Total=7545mbytes When trying to create logical, extended or dos drives(or whatever they are called), it says there is not enough space…. I wouldn’t do this until seeking advice anyway...…just seeing if it would allow the operation Does this give anybody an idea as to what I can do to remedy this and get all my data back?

Does the disk contain a i386 folder anywhere on the disk? Does it contain the *.cab files? If it does you can run winnt /b [actual command] and this will start the install. You can do a parallel install. Trick here is to name the winnt folder when asked to winnt2 or other name as to not overwrite your original install. This should repair the boot sector and get you booting again. This may even give you access to your original install since it appears booting is your only issue. There are two issues of concern here. One is that you never defragmented the drive. NT has no built in defrag and you have to purchase the product seperate. NTFS is very sensitive to not being defragged and can result in a unrecoverable system. The other is that you are infected by a virus and it wiped your master boot record. You do not need to be concerned about the 7.8gig bios/ntfs bug boot limit. It appears your disk is 7.5gig in size. I would also point out you risk problems using such a old fdisk version. This is why its reporting hpfs instead of ntfs. There is a new one you can download from MS web site.

Wanderer, thanks for the valuable feedback....I know there is an i386 folder...as i recall, I was unable to copy the ntldr and ntdetect.com from c: (i wasn't allowed to change attributes and copying was unsucessful) so i copied them from /i386. I also downloaded the w98OEM boot disk from bootdisk.com (something i read on one of my trawls through all these posts)and this reported a disk size of 11,xxx mbytes, ntfs...is this useful info?? I will perform this again and note down all values ....Regarding the old fdisk, this came with the boot disk - dos622 - downloaded from bootdisk.com...do i DL a bootdisk from ms or just DL fdisk

....anyway, i couldn't locate the cab files. and i can confirm that when using the win98OEM bootdisk to boot my deceased mate, the following is returned Current fixed diskdrives=1 Partition=1 Status=A Type=ntfs Volume label= Mbytes=11510 system=0 Usage=100 Total=11510mbytes

Well, i bought C++5.0 compiler on eBay that includs NT4 Workstation for $8 but it is on CD and if you don't have a CD-ROM drive ... wow .. you are out of luck. BTW NT4 does not use .cab files ... just everything in i386 folder is .XX_ (compressed files). Without a CD-ROM drive you will have to pull the HD and try to repair on another computer ... even then ... very poor possibilities. NT4 never came on floppies so you can't reinstall without an optical drive. NTFSDOS will let you read files from the i386 folder but you cannot execute setup via booting from a dos disk .. wrong file system. Probably best hope for file recovery is to put the drive in another machine (adapters are available to use on desktop machine ide cable). Best