Hey everyone, look, I was at my grandfather's house and was updating his xp home edition from service pack 1 to 2, unfortunately the power cut out about half way through the install, during the part where they don't let you cancel the operation (I was using my flash drive to install it since his dial-up would take too long to get service pack 2 on his comp.) Now when I try to turn on the comp, it comes up with the usual message "Windows did not shut down properly, and cannot boot up properly because of a recent hardware and/or software change" and they give me the usual options for booting up, and NO MATTER WHAT I PICK, it says " the file <Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe could not be found, please re-install this file", and then it just loops into trying to turn back on, and so on and so on. I put my flash drive back in the same slot it was in, but it doesn't help. So, my question is can I use the emachines recovery discs to reinstall xp ? would it fix the problem? The reason I ask is because I do not have the recovery discs, my grandfather threw them out on accident and we have to purchase new ones. So is the hdd ruined or can it be saved with the recovery discs? Because I don't feel like putting in a new hdd in his computer. Any help is gladly appreciated. And thanks to all who read and replied to this.

I could be wrong, but, isn't there also a recovery partition to boot from also ? like pressing f11 or something , just after the bios post, ( instead of f8 , for safe mode) MSI 845e mb 1 gb ram and a p4 2.4n running xp ,win 2000 advanced server and win 98 SE alot to learn and I know so little !!!!

The Harddrive should be OK. You have an incomplete update. I think you are going to need the restore disks. You may need to purchase one from Emachines if still available.

What caused the power to go out? The HDD is not ruined, but what you should have done was copy SP2 onto the HDD & then installed it from there. You've tried tapping F8 during bootup & then selecting "last known good configuration"? I may be wrong, but I think if you use the eMachines recovery CDs, you will lose all files on the HDD & it would be like starting from scratch. http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/...

Replace the missing file with a copy from a working machine. To do this, you'll need a bootable disc that is capable of reading and writing to NTFS partitions (assuming you're using NTFS). You should be able to copy the file from a flash drive to the system32 folder. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.

Thanks to all who responded, as I said, it won't get past the boot-up menu, I'll try the f11 thing, but I'm also going to get the recovery discs. The power went out because it was raining, and it was a quick brown out, but big enough to kill the power for a few seconds. I know if you use the recovery discs it will reformat the hard drive, that's fine to me, my grandparents didn't have anything important to begin with in the first place.

yes try the f11 key my emachines computer has the recovery partition and i just start pressing f11 and i can reinstall XP also, a UPS system would be a good idea to get! :)