Hi all, I`ve had a problem with XP successfully booting about only one in five attempts. The problem started after I added a secondary hard disk. After I had successfully formatted the slave drive, all seemed OK but my problems persisted. I ended up completely reinstalling XP but the problem was still there. I ended up deleting my primary partition, and resizing it in case XP still had something on the drive. I also deleted all other partitions on the drive just to be sure. The fresh install went fine but with one exception. Instead of labelling my primary partition C, it named it J! I used XP`s disk manager to rename all the partitions. All seemed fine. I installed my software, worked all day with 4 or 5 test reboots during the day. No problem. Next morning, I get the `ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupt` message again!! I follow the steps outlined in the Microsoft support section, and try both methods of repair: coying a new ntoskrn.exe file from the XP CD, and also using the repair console`s bootcfg to effect a repair. Both initially worked but the error soon returned. This morning, I did a repair install. Surely this should wipe out any errors right? No, still there!! What`s going on? I cannot face another fresh install, as reinstalling all my software takes half a day! Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help. Chris

Looks like maybe this: Error Message: Windows Could Not Start Because of a Computer Disk Hardware Configuration Problem http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314477

Yes, that`s the problem, and those are the procedures I`ve already tried to no avail. Thanks anyway. I `ll keep trying!

Just to let anyone else who has had a similar problem know that my damn hard disk was faulty! Of course it decided to `almost` work which is what caused me days of grief. Did a fresh install with another drive. No problem!!