On Wednesday I decided to sell my Nokia phone and accessories. Having found a suitable offer, I rushed to my PC to unplug the data cable from the Serial port. As it turns out I pulled out the monitor adapter from the VGA port by mistake. Not good. I also knocked the mains adapter from the PSU. Look, it was a bad day OK. Naturally, I rebooted as fast as I could to inspect any damage. To my surprise the computer started OK, up to where the WindowsXP SP2 splash screen dissappears. Windows definately booted, because the logoff music made me jump when I switched the machine off! First, I tested my monitor on another machine – worked OK. Then I connected another monitor to my machine - same problem. I came to the conclusion there must be problem with the onboard graphics, so I decided to pick up a basic video card from Novatech and see if that made any difference. I fitted the card, then booted up and the following error message appeared: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt. <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe Please reinstall a copy of the above file." This is really anoying, because although I couldn’t see anything before, Windows seemed to boot OK. Then I decided to low-level format the HD using another machine and then reinstall XP. (This worked for me when I screwed my partion table trying to dual-boot XP & Suse 9.1). During the installation, Setup could not contiune because ‘ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt’. How is this possible if I’ve written zeros to the disk?? I also tried clearing the CMOS, and using the XP recovery console. Both to no avail. I have an MSI MS-6570 based around the Nvidia’s nForce2 chipset. What do you think?

why didn't you boot with the xp disk?? do a repair on the c: drive. there is no data loss that way

As I said, I have tried this - setup fails because a file that can't possibly be on the hard disk is missing! Makes no sense. I tried using XP's recovery console to run fdisk and what not, but this seems futile - Western Digital's diagnostic utilities reported no logical or physical errors on the disk?

Check your connections again. I've seen it happen on some mobo's when the keyboard is not connected properly.