NT 4.0 Server Parallel Installation

The reason you create a parallel installation is to provide access to the registry in the original installation. From the parallel installation, you can open REGEDT32 and manually repair the corrupted registry. Once REGEDT32 is open, choose Registry, then Load Hive, and choose the appropriate Registry file from the original isntallation directory.

That having been said, you still have to figure out what is broken and unfortunately, based on the information so far, I can't offer help much on that because the Registry is a big file with lots of keys and quite a number of them can stop the machine from booting. But you might look carefully at the CurrentControlSet and compare it to other ControlSets.

Hope this gives you a start towards finding the problem. Usually if you can identify the last thing done (installation of new hardware or software, etc), that will give you some clues on which registry keys to look at first.

paul

I've had success with the first two answers but you can also do this with a different HDD. Install NT 4.0 on a different HDD without the original HDD in the Server. I'm assuming that you are using NTFS so make sure you set the new configuration touse NTFS also. After everything is setup with the Administration account and any additional accounts need to mimic the original HDD NT 4, shutdown the Server and install the original HDD as an additional HDD. This differs depending on whether you are using IDE or SCSI. This should give you access to your original data files.

This worked for me. Good luck