My mother has an IBM 300PL with 256K RAM, running Windows 98, which was used on the network from the company she retired from. I installed Windows XP on it about two months ago. I followed the screen prompts to check for compatibility, and there were no problems found. I thought Windows XP overrode the previous system, because when it booted up, it went directly into Windows XP, except for showing some quick flashing messages and the following: “PME-M04 – Initialing network boot device using interrupt 18th . . . . .” Everything appeared to be working fine until one day last week when she booted up. She got the regular PME-M04 . . . message, but then got the following: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt. /system32/ntoskrnl.exe Please reinstall a copy of above file.” I’ve tried to restart using the Windows XP CD, but that does nothing. That same message keeps coming back aboutre install a copy of above file.I was able to copy the missing file onto a CD, but I cannot figure out how to install it. There are no original system disks with this computer. I know I need to make a set of boot-up disks. My questions are: 1. Where do I begin? 2. How do I uninstall the network software and Windows 98 (which are not needed)? This machine is used primarily to type letters and play simple games, mainly from CDs. 3. If I reformat the hard drive, how do I then get that long set of numbers to re-activate Windows XP, without contacting the customer service people? I thought they would only allow you to activate the product one time. I have read previous posts and solutions. They have not worked in this situation. Thanks for your help with this matter. This is an awesome forum.

Okay first thing first. You said "I thought they would only allow you to activate the product one time." Nope! As long as you install XP on 1 machine you can format and reinstall million times if you want. After all it is yours. You are willing to format right? And you do have XP CD right? First try this Start > All Programs > Accesseries > Command Prompt Type sfc /scannow It will ask your CD. If that doesn't work. I will say format and clean install XP is way to go. Clean install always work better than upgrade.

I still cannot get pass “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt. /system32/ntoskrnl.exe Please reinstall a copy of above file.” I have Windows XP Home CD installed in the drive, but that message keeps popping up. I even have boot disks, but still cannot get pass that message. Is there any way around this? I am able to get to BIOS. I've never changed anything there before, but maybe I need to. Can someone direct me? Thanks for the advice.

To get the computer to read the CD one thing you should do is go into the bios and make the cdrom the first boot device then the hard drive the 2nd boot device, so it will read the cd rom before it reads the harddrive

I think the error message is reffering to the windows logo, if you can drop to the bios and select the cdrom as the first boot device, load up from there 8-)