I cloned a drive?

[Sterling]

Thanks in advance for any help. a long time ago i partitioned my 30 gig hdd into drive C win98, D win2k, E win98 programs F win2k programs G kinda a default drive for Fav's, my docs etc. and J for storage of stuff This system has worked great for me although I am not sure why i have 2 parts for the programs E 98 programs and F win2k programs Any way I have another drive that is not connected to the computer but does have a working win2k OS on it for this computer Having other hdd's around i got a little confused and connected the hdd with the win2k OS on the master slave ribbion of my computer. Needless to say all hell broke loose. I disconnected my 2nd hdd the one with only the working 2k OS on it, then upon reboot I got my usual menu of which OS I wanted to startup. I high litled win2k and got this message:windows could not start because the windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt. OK, sounds like the whole thing is dust to me. I fired up win98 look at my drives everything is like it should be but i now have an extra drive that is the exact copy of win2k. Its properties are exact to to the D drive? I tried restoring the ntoskrnl.exe from ghost explorer, no go, it restores but same crash at startup.Now eventually i did restore my system (only win2k and win2k programs and all was fine for a week. Then yeserday while being connected to my office computer from my house on the computer in question by AOL's AIM, my computer froze (very rare), all i could do was rebbot,and guess what? yep same thing. How has this happend? 1.4 amd cpu. 512 pc100 ram, 128mb nvdia G force GX440 vid card<bad mistake 30gig wd hdd.I gotta know what has happened as i guess i will be proned to this now no matter what. I knew that the other hdd did this but now i am not so sure. So there it is any ideas. Repair with 2k on fix boot went well but still has prob, little nervious about fixmbr as i might loose other partitions.Thanks Sterling

[MrPurple]

from my understanding of multibooting with windows, and using the windows system manager that comes with win 2K (unless you are using something else to manager your booting).
The boot file will be on the primary partition. Edit that file and see what is there, it might give us and you some clues on what is going on.

[RedFury]

Perhaps there is an issue in the Bios? A setting that changed when you changed HDDs? Maybe trying to reset the configuration to defaults would help. Certainly is strange though.

Almost seems as if something is pointing at the wrong thing within 2k.

Upon further reading, is it possible that something from the 30 gig 2k was stuck in system Memory when you swapped HDDs back? Did you pull the power plug from the system when you swapped drives? If you didn't , there may be enough juice to keep data in the system memory, and it loaded into your partitioned 2k system and corrupted something ( there are virus' that can do this by hijacking from on computer via floppy to memory to HDD, and stays in the memory until the power is completely pulled, the power button hit a few times to discharge capacitors to kill it.

[Sterling]

Intrestin anwsers thanks

Mr. Purple I am letting windows handel the booting and i have looked already at the boot ini and it says what it has always said fast dected win2000 etc...

RedFury- I have looked at the bios and no changes . It see all like it was. I even ran fdisk and looked at the part info and it is exactly like it should be.. The power issue might be something, i have not un-pluged the system. Could give that a try, what I don;t understand is this: I do not keep my system running. I turn it off every night, why then would this happen out of the clear blue? It did work ok for a week. Only on the freze up when rebooting did this happen. Thanks any more ideas gentelmen would be of help. sterling

[MrPurple]

So in boot.ini the boot lines for both win98 and win2k point to the proper drive letters?

Other then that I can't think of anything that would cause a corrupted ntoskrnl.exe

[RedFury]

Sterlin, from what I understand from your first post is that this happened after you ran a different HDD with 2k on it. My thoughts were that perhaps something that , as you stated "I knew that the other hdd did this but now i am not so sure." was wrong with the seperate 2k install had transferred itself to your multipartitioned drive through system memory, as the actual power supply had not been cut from power, thus supplying enough trickle voltage to keep the memory powered enough to keep that info there to be transferred to the larger drive.

[Sterling]

Thank you for the help. I do not see my last post anwsering MRPurple. I have a copy of my boot ini that is found on drive c the win98 os partition.[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microso ft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows"

So it appears to be like it is supposed to be. I looked at my ghost file and it is exact.
Redfury. Yes i thought i understood what u meant, so if while it had juice going to it the copy was made. I can buy that but i used my ghost backup of the drives and restored win2k and drive F the programs to win2k. That caused it to work fine for about a week with re-booting every morning. Only the crash being on aim did that problem come back. In any case I guess i will have to restore the ghost for the 2 drives D and F. If it goes like last week wehn this first happened, all will be ok, however if i crash again this problem could sure come back.. Strange hu? Thanks again

[midfielder]

re: Missing or corrupt file in 2000 : Ntoskrnl.exe
Monday, February 3, 2003 at 1:07 pm
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by BogdanSUA [find other messages by BogdanSUA]

* See if this helps (don't think the boot loader will do much if got missing/corrupted file ) credit goes to below person...I just had to create an account to pass this on to you.

"Go to a working W2K machine and copy the missing file to a floppy disk, located in
c:\winnt\system32 on the working machine.

Then get a boot disk and use it boot up your faulty machine.

Then insert the disk that has the file you just copied from the working machine.

Then copy the missing file from the floppy drive to the hard drive.

If you don't know DOS command lines to copy the file from the floppy to the faulty
machine, here is what you'll need to type once you start the computer with your boot
disk.

The command lines to do this are:

a:
copy ntoskrnl.exe c:\winnt\system32\

Hope this helps,
BogdanSUA "

I never used a Ghost program, but I could clone the whole partition (back and forth- kind of backup-only with all apps and customization on it ) using nothing but a floppy to boot before Windows

- troubleshoot/low format/transfer from one drive to another for no cost (courtesy of -depending what HD you use ... the secret is if want to use something like Maxtor's MaxBlast 3 (free download)- one of the Drives must be ID as Maxtor (likewise if WD - Western Digital's Data Lifeguard will work if WD HD detected- it would have taken me a week to re-install OS+apps+customize

( 2 times cause of Win Update gone bad), all done in 20 minutes (1st 5min need be around , then come back in 15 min. set BIOS to boot newly copied partition).

Do a chkdsk once up and running and run RegCleaner (hard to find free vs.- now shareware Macecraft - found old free at http://www.zdnet.de/downloads/progra...de0AXS-wc.html
* used the free vs. before became shareware, and see no need to fix a good thing...unless must have the newer vs.

another helpful site (tools burned to CD-R)
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ from highly respected Langa.com

Everytime I do WinUpdate, I run Regcleaner to throw out some bad ActiveX crap, also use WinDoctor (Norton Utilities (NSW)
so far not dissapointed me and had lot less OS trouble since parked IE6- and use Opera 7.5 , Moz Firefox 0.8 and not worry much about all the security warnings about IE and spoofings et all.

If I must use IE, aside from masquerading Opera to identify itself as IE for picky sites, one better is MyIE2 (although much better customization controls -share same engine (shell on top of IE ))
and can dress it up in a Mac skin too or other choice.

Funny how windows runs for me a lot better with 3rd party software, instead of the integrated -bundle

enjoy-midfielder!

[Sterling]

midfielder
Thanks for all that. I will look at the sites. I ended up putting the ghost imange back on although that is only a temp. prob i think. It all went well and one could not tell it ever had a prob. Intresting how you backup i may try that on another box at the house. Any way wanted to say thanks for ur work and all that u posted . Sterling