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Restoring Windows2000 core executable

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9 replies

by steve.doig

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Hi,

Trying to restore my Win2k standalone machine which crashes just before loading windows. I remember seeing an error message along the lines "windows.exe" has become corrupted/damaged...

I doubt the actual file was windows.exe, but it was no doubt a required core executable; something like winnt.exe.

Some suggestions of what this file may be would be much appreciated.

Also a description of where to extract the file from and directory to restore to would help.

9 replies

by zog the mighty

If you run the setup from your Windows 2000 CDROM, there is an option to Repair an existing installation of W2K rather than reinstalling it. This would seem to me to be your best course of action.
Keep in mind that you will need to re-apply any Service Packs you may have installed. You should also need to check Windows Update and reinstall any updates that may have been overwritten by the repair procedure.

by steve.doig

When choosing the repair option, the Windows 2000 installation can't be found, nor do I have an emergency disk.

When in the recovery console, I cannot see any of the contents of drive (partition) c, which is the only NTFS partition out of 4 on the drive.

I can let the machine boot, and it loads normally right until the windows environment appear, before which it crashes and reboots.

by dgust

You may have go into the BIOS and select the CD ROM to be boot device but using the repair choice on the CD should be the correct solution. If that fails, I would wonder if the HD is in trouble and it may not be repairable. Of course you could startit with a startup disk for a win98 or 95 machine. If it gets to a menu then you can chose exit and you get a DOS prompt. You can see if you can switch to C: from A: at this time and if the HD is working OK you should be able to use DIR on any partition other than NT formatted partitions.

by steve.doig

I ended up deleting the NT partition as in above comment- the HDD seems fine...

Thanks for your reply

by steve.doig

Running diskpart in the recovery console, my drive partitions are incorrectly listed as:
-- inactive (OS2 / Boot Manager) 2016 MB
c: FAT32 (APPS) 2000 MB
d: FAT32 (DATA) 2000 MB
e: FAT32 (INTERNET) 2040 MB

where in fact the first partition is NTFS and should be mapped as c:

I've run fixboot, which reports the bootsector was corrupt, the partition uses NTFS, and a new bootsector has been written successfully.

fixmbr also confirms that Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 has had a new master boot record written successfully

running diskpart again, the partitions are displayed as above.

My original aim to restore the files that were reported as damaged may be in vain if I can't repair the NTFS partition.

Can I delete the first partition and replace with a fresh, active NTFS partition and reinstall Win2K?

I cannot see another way, unless I have some other recovery tool (which I don't have).

Regards

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