Chris J

Hi,

I have just joined a new team and was given a win 2k server to develop on. Unfortunately after just one afternoon I have broken it. Now on reboot it complains that the boot.ini (?) is missing or corrupt, and then goes on to say that ntoskrnl.exe is also missing or corrupt.

This would be fine normally as I would wipe it and start a fresh, but I have just been informed that there is a fair bit of installed software that they want to keep and that I should try and fix it.

Is there anything I can do? There are no backups of the machine, and the recovery disks etc are for win 2k proffessional and not server.

Please, any help would be great.

Chris

HHxx

OMG Chris........

I will try a rack my brains on this one, haven't done this in real life yet, only remember doing this on a MS course a few years ago and it is repairable. Quick question, Is the HD formatted as NTFS or FAT32? Is it scsi or ide?

H

HHxx

Chris,
do you have an identical machine there hardware wise - ish??? Make a recovery disk from this and try it.

Wheres Deano when you need him

H

Chris J

Cheers guys. The machine is a HP Kayak 800 xu, with SCSI drives, and I assumed that it would be NTFS, although I may have to check.

I have tracked down a win2k server disk, but as it is an MSDN disk it isn't bootable .

Not a good start to things just before xmas.

Chris

PS. Oh and yes there are quite a few machines which are the same hardware wise, but have different software installed. Will the recovery disk try to mess about with the software settings?

[Edited by Chris J - 12/20/2001 3:03:25 PM]

ChrisB

Can you pull the HD out and slave it into another PC? Then try to grab the files that way?

Galaf

You could have a look at this little programm

http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

I have never used it myself but maybe it'll do the job...

Cheers

Laurent

Larry_L

you haven't got a floppy in the drive have you???

HHxx

Good point Larry, forgot about that one

Chris J, if no one has sorted out this by the time I get home, I'll try and dig out my notes.

I'm leaving the office now, got an appointment. Going the long route in the scooby

H

dsmith

HHxx - I dont have all the Hardware (no ones left it lying around )

ChrisJ
If its an MSDN CD (well any of the CDs) there is subdirectory called bootdisk. On another machine have 4 floppys handy and run the bootdisk utility in that directory. This will create the set of 4 boot floppies for Win2K server.

Boot off these (it takes half an afternoon its sooo slow). At some point you will get the option to repair or install. Obviuosly () choose repair and it should rebuild the boot bits.

We had a Win2k server do this the other day it seems 2 partitions managed to disagree on which one was active. We still dont know why it did it. Fortunately it was a test box so just got blatted and re-installed.

I *know* the MSDN cd has the bootimages because I was building the C/S Lan Server last night from an MSDN Win2K CD and the poor old thing can't boot from its SCSI CD-Rom.

Deano



[Edited by dsmith - 12/20/2001 3:58:24 PM]

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

Deano

That is tedious, isn't it? Trying to install W2K @ home with Adaptec & SCSI and it just *won't* have it

Ended up bunging in a IDE CD-Rom just to get things going

dsmith

Especially when the server's in the loft and you have to keep runnning up and down the loft ladder to change floppies - fortunately monitor and keyboard downstairs on an "acquired" 8 port servswicth (complete with 5m cables)

IDE not even an option - no on-board IDE - and no BIOS option to allow CD booting - Yes its that old

Now I find UT doesn't like Win2K server as a server OS, So may have to rebuild with NT 4.

Deano

dogmaul

u need an rdisk or you cant repair it

LanCat

Silly question but have you hit F8 while it's booting and tried the options there?

Nimbus

dsmith
Ooooh... I wonder what that is for....




[Edited by Nimbus - 12/20/2001 5:38:19 PM]

David_Wallis

you have mail.

barge

Get yourself some ERD software from Winternals software

Its the get out of jail software

Mail me direct if you want to know more

ChrisB

Deano,

Are you getting the old huuuuuuuge Ping problem on W2k?

shunty

Barge - nice to see someone else using winternals stuff, I've been using it for a while now, it's the best recovery software I've come across. Theres still a lot of engineers who creat a fat partition for recovery purposes, even compaq engineers.... LOL

shunty

dsmith

ChrisB - No I haven't installed UT yet - but was warned off Win2K for UT by Lee

Chris J

Hi all,

Thanks for all your help and advice etc, much appreciated. I think I will give the msdn boot disk thing a go, but as I am finishing at lunch time it might have to wait after xmas/new year. So this might popup after xmas when I get stuck again .

thanks again.

Chris

kryten

Er, what did you do? (and don't say nothing, as that is only true in very rare circumstances!!).

Do they mean that there is stuff on the disk that shouldn't be deleted as they need the data. If so and assuming there is more than one partition, install a second copy of W2k. Even if its an NTFS partition you can then still get at the data. Its pretty common to do two W2k/NT installs on an NTFS only machine as then you nearly always have an 'escape plan'.

If they mean that there are just applications that are installed then I'd re-install the OS and then the Apps. Usually takes less time than a hack of the machine and you get a nice clean OS again.

If however, they mean they have apps that they don't have the discs for anymore then WHY don't they have them......

As its SCSI, was there an external device that's been added/removed?

Can you post the EXACT error you're getting. Have you looked the error code up on MSDN?

Chris J

Hi,

All I was doing was installing some software. The software in question was AIM/COE thing that my company uses to distribute software/service packs etc. It asked me to restart, which I did and then this all happened. Wasn't impressed.

Anyway the first error was along the lines of the boot.ini file being missing, booting from c:\winnt\boot.ini. This is what I remember so may be wrong. I have copied a new version of the boot.ini and so no longer get the error.

The second error is

" Windows 2000 could not start beacuase the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file."

The file in question I think is more than a floppy, and also I am not sure about service pack versions.

I have created the boot disks and tried to repair it but haven't got very far. I chose the option to repair it, and it gives me two options, the console or emergency repair. I tried the ermergency repair, and custom, but as I don't have a repair disk it tries to locate win2000 install, but it can't. The console gives me a command prompt which I used to add a new boot.ini file. Is there anything I can do from here to try and repair it?

Sorry for asking so many questions and being generally clueless.

Oh and it is in NTFS on a single scsi hard drive with an IDE CD-ROM.

Thanks all

Chris

kryten

You have mail!

Right.

Where did you get the boot.ini? There are differences between the way scsi/ide systems locate the install.

The fact that the repair cannot find a system suggests one of a few things:

The disc is trashed
The boot.ini you have is incorrect
The W2k files have been deleted.
The partition has been ‘optimised’ and the boot files are no longer accessible

Most likely is the boot.ini

Try deleting the boot.ini you added and make a not of the exact error message.

Check what files are in c:\ (use dir /ah and dir /as to see the hidden/system files).

To be honest, this has happened more than once and we always do a re-install as its quicker than all the hacking about trying to get the thing working again.