Continuous rebooting

I'm working on fixing a computer. The prob was that it wasn't booting, the ntoskrnl.exe file was missing so i pulled that file from the win2k CD and put in it the right place. That made it boot up until the welcome screen and then it just restarts, repeating continuously, safe mode, debug mode nothing works. Since that one file was missing i don't know what else could be missing. I checked the bootlog and the last thing to load successfuly was MUP after that everything failed. I wanted to try using repair on the win2k CD but it wouldn't boot from there. Anyone have any idea's on what the problem is? I'd like to avoid reformating if possible.

 

Use some boot disks (floppies) to boot to the Win2K CD and repair the installation. after it is repaired and it boots, you can stop it from ever auto rebooting again by going to Control Panerl>System>Advanced Tab
and then under "Startup and recovery" click Settings. Then, under "System Failure" uncheck "Automatically Restart "

 

W2K repair procedure in the following link.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic8356.html
You'll will need to reload SP4 and all other windows updates after the repair install as well as reload hardware driver updates such as graphics card etc. If you still have the same problem, this may indicate a hardware problem or a software issue not corrected by the repair install. A reformat would be your next step followed by swapping out hardware, or swap out hardware if you don't have sufficient backups and can't go the reformat route. But a reformat may be required one way or another?

 

I got it working using floppy's and repair. I'm still on 100% sure what caused it but at least its working tx for ur advice