Cannot Boot W2K Server

I will try to explain all I've done, which is a lot, the good, the bad & the ugly!

Win2K server with all upgrades/packs
Dell PowerEdge SC420
1gb RAM or maybe better
IDE Drive (OS)
SATA Drive (Extra)
IIS 5?...web server for company

The eventlog started showing bad blocks on primary. I ran chkdsk /r and then it said ntoskrnl was missing or corrupt. I ran chkdsk /r again & by the grace of God, it booted. I discovered it was booting into temp profile and the real "admin" profile had "bak" added to it. Of course, each time I did reboot, the temp was recreated. I could go into the "bak" profile and see all the shortcuts in the desktop folder and open items with them. I opened the "users directory" to see if it would let me add a user to access a secure section of our site but when I tried to save it, it gave a generic error of unable to create and to contact the administrator. DOH!

Our web site is running just fine......the FTP program is running fine.....current users can log into the secure area just fine too, just can't create new ones.

Ok.....now for some stupid stuff I did. I've worked so many hours on this & searched & googled until my eyes are popping out and my wife is threatening to leave me! LOL I restored the "C" drive (OS) from a backup (123Backup - KieSoft) but apparrently it ******* things up worse. Somewhere in here I had an error about corrupted or missing ntoskrnl as well. I tried renaming the system & system.alt and replaced them from the backup? folder inside /winnt/repair/regback (*EDIT* finally remembered the name of that folder!) but that only made it want me to choose the option to repair domain controller option.

I couldn't get around all that so I just now restored the system & system.alt files I renamed earlier & ran chkdsk /r then ran fixboot.

Fixboot says:
The target partition is The file system on the startup partition is unknown. FIXBOOT is attempting to detect the file system type.

The bootsector is corrupt.
FIXBOOT is checking the filesystem type...
The partition is using the FAT file system.

FIXBOOT is writing a new boot sector.

The new bootsector was successfully written.

I type exit & it reboots. Goes to Starting Windows with vertical bars at bottom and then, pretty quick, says it could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEMced startup options for Windows 2000, press F8. ......Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.

Ok.....the whole reason I'm trying to fight this is so I don't have to reinstall W2K Server & reset everything! I have a backup of registry & "c" drive settings.....as I've said, I think, early I did try to restore the files but it did not work and only caused more problems. When it would boot & run as mentioned, it will not now. I already have the new drive with W2K installed and have actually been using it as test environment to try & get through this, to no avail.

I really need some serious help here! God help me if I haven't learned my lesson as a new (supposed) admin, to make sure I have HDD images to restore from next time. Now, if only someone could please, please help me through this, if at all possible! If it helps one iota, you can send me a message with your phone number & I will call you. LOL I'm right here in the server room with the broken server & several other PCs that I can access www from.

Thank you for reading this exhaustingly long post!

 

Update......No offense is intended but I am just rebuilding the server on a new HDD. I still would like to know, at more of a convenience now, what I might could have done to bring the OS back, if anything.

I learned some valuable things by going through this that I won't soon forget. The biggest thing I learned is a reinforcement of the golden rule, "Thou Shalt Have Backups ", but I should revise it to say, "Thou Shalt Have Images! ". DOH!!

My next chore is to make mirror images of all the OS drives on my servers.