Squawk7777

Hiya folks,

I got a bit of a computer problem that I’m unsure of how to tackle it correctly. Basic info: Laptop, Win XP Basic, nothing fancy.
XP didn’t boot up today, instead I got an error message stating that the file ntoskrnl.exe could not to found or that it was corrupt and to reinstall it (rename the old file and install the new one).

As my luck will have it I’m out of town, but I managed to get hold of a XP Pro CD. Inserted it, hit the recovery (R) button and waited for the command prompt like in the good old MS-DOS days. It took suspiciously long and as I entered dir c: I got a message that “an error occurred”. Certainly, not a good sign, hdd trouble ahead I thought, but still a few possibilities left. Entered dir d: and that (still) worked and awaited to see what message I’d get after entering CHKDSK c: /P. Progress stopped at 25%, but the disk was still being accessed/fixed. It took a long time, and as I returned I noticed that my screen turned off (BIOS power setting).

Couldn’t turn the screen back on, so I decided to restart the whole process (hdd was not being accessed) or see if the problem had been fixed. After rebooting I realized that my keyboard was on strike. Fine! Now I am slowly starting to get aggravated, and regain access to my files through a CD-Rom launched LINUX version called UBUNTU. The only thing is it does not offer a program like SCANDISK that can scan and repair damaged sectors (which I suspect happened here).

The only solution I see is to create a bootable USB stick and program an autoexec file that launches SCANDISK. But how do you do that?

Other than that my day went fine by the way.

7 7 7 7

twiggs

The Ultimate boot CD
This has plenty of hard drive tools.

kenhughes

Thanks to Microsoft treating its customers like complete morons, the error message 'NTOSKRNL.EXE could not be found' doesn't necessarily mean that the file is missing or corrupted.

This error has also been known to be caused by keyboard problems - not easy to swap on a laptop. A missing boot.ini file will also cause the ntoskrnl.exe missing message.

From your symptoms, I would suspect a mechanical problem rather than software/disk issues.

There's a step-by-step walkthrough here: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000646.htm

born2fly_au

If the problem is a Hard Drive failure. Try removing the HDD and placing it in another PC as a slave and run scandisk or similar to see if there are errors. And at least get any important data off the drive before it crashes completely.
If the HDD is on the way out it would be worth replacing it with a new one. They are reasonably priced these days

Another solution although not cheap is to run a program called Spinrite from www.grc.com. It has been known to fix some serious errors on a HDD.

born2fly