w2k will not startup

Have an old Dell T450 with an 80gig drive connected to a Promise ATA 133 tx2 controller card with W2K installed. No floppy drive.

Was not having any problems with the system, until I tried to restart it the other day. It will not start and gives the following message on a blue screen:
Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINNT\SYSTEM32|CONFIG\SYSTEMced. Startup options for Windows 2000 press F8....

Cannot access any startup option and when booting to the CD cannot access the repair function. Tried to install Windows, but message states no drive found. Checked all connections, etc..... no problems found.

Any ideas appreciated.

 

To diagnose the problem, first see if the disk is visible in the BIOS Setup program. If it is, the problem is likely Windows, and you may have to delete and and allow the windows CD to remake the partition and reinstall windows.

If not, since you don't have a floppy drive, would make a bootable DOS CD to see if the disk is visible in DOS. I use Ghost 2003 to do this, but there are .ISO files downloadable to do this also. The nice feature of Ghost is that you get both the a:> prompt and whatever programs would fit on a: and you also get the CD and programs you want to run from there. And if it is, treat the partition and installation as above.

If that's not a solution, I suspect you may need a new PCI card or a hard disk, and you may have to find out by trial replacemint.

 

Thanks

Thanks sparrow;

Bios does show the hard drives.

When I boot to the Windows 2000 CD and the files are loaded gives message that the drive is new.....when selecting the repair option I get the same "file missing or corrupted \winnt\system32.....etc

How do I delete the partition so that a new one can be made..... I know that I could do it with fdisk but do not have a floppy drive.

thanks.

 

Failed

Thanks for your suggestion. I downloaded and printed the KB article and followed the guidance.

When I got to the Recovery Console tool and typed the commands suggested, C:\>cd system32\config, etc... I received the following message each and every time; "The path to the file specified is not valid ".

Any other advice appreciated.

thanks

 

Was this tool mentioned in that KB article?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...01-2c68-4de8-9229-ca494362419c&DisplayLang=en

 

Yes

Looked at that. Unfortunately the system has no floppy drive.

Thanks,