Can you give me more details on how your drive failed? There's a couple drive necromancy tricks you can try in your own home that might bring it back long enough to yank files. (For example, if it spins up but then hangs after a few seconds, it's possibly a conductor failure, and freezing the drive for a couple hours might buy you another half hour of life. Repeat 2-3 times, that's enough to pull everything.

Also, once you do go looking for a new drive, remember the old advice, don't buy a drive that's associated with a company that starts with M. (IE Maxtor and Memorex... also Seagate's Momentus lineup sucks, I bought one of those and the drive died a month in, and they refused to warranty it.) WD is reportedly pretty good.

the exact error message is "WIndows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe. Please re-install a copy of the above file."

the error occurred after leaving the computer unattended (and off) from friday-monday this last weekend;


I've tried the general stuff, (start in safe mode, start with last known working config, unplug keyboard) but a few of them I cannot do/try because we don't have any sort of recovery or install disk for Windows XP Home.

Ah, okay. That's actually not nearly as bad as it could be; it DOES mean your data is all still there. However, it does *probably* mean that the disk platters (the physical little plastic-ish sheets inside) are starting to go.

First things first, you may be able to temporarily fix it, at least enough to get windows back. Blah blah not my fault blah blah spontaneous combustion... but.

Get yourself a command-line boot drive. The old-school C:\> thing. If you can get a friend with a copy of XP to make you a boot disk, that's awesome, alternately there are a bunch of free Linux things that you can download and drop on a USB. Knoppix is reputedly fairly good, though I've never used it myself.

Windows, in it's mixed wisdom, has a backup of your corrupted file but can't copy it on it's own. You should be able to copy the backup into the main directory by hand. No promises that it'll work properly, but it's better than just giving up.

From the C: prompt, enter the following line. (Note that this is for the DOS style command line, if you're using a linux thing you may have to use a slightly different command, but at least this'll tell you where you're looking.)

copy c:\windows\system32\dllcache\ntoskrnl.exe c:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

It'll probably ask if you want to overwrite it. Say yes. Reboot, try again. One of three things will happen:

1- It'll still say that the file is corrupt. If so, the system backed up sometime after that file was screwed up and there's not too much you can do... if this hapens, let me know, I have a (legitimate) XP home CD here, maybe I can get you a copy of the file as it would be coming right off of the installation disk. No promises that *that* would work, either, but it wouldn't hurt to try.
2- It'll say a *similar* error message about another file, probably in the same system32 directory. You can try doing the same thing as above with the next file as well if the file appears in the dllcache directory, but bear in mind the more backups you restore from, the worse the chances that the system will be stable in the end.
3- It'll boot perfectly. If this happens, run a couple virus scans, and also scan the disk for physical errors (Right click on your C: drive, go to properties, open the "tools" tab, click "check now" under the "error checking" heading, and select "scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors.") If it comes back and reports *any* bad sectors, the disk probably won't last the month.

Now comes the fun part. If you can't get it to boot anymore, as I said, given that you can at least get to the error screen, the data should still all be accessible if you were to take the drive and put it into someone else's computer as a secondary. So at the least, you haven't lost anything too important.

I suggest to you that (if at all possible) you try to get a new hard drive, even if the scanner comes back with no bad sectors. Once a hard drive starts to hiccup like this, the entire drive is on it's last legs. See my previous post for suggestions as to brands, but I know that leaves you in the lurch for an operating system. Sorry, I don't have any helpful advice on that...

In the interim, I'd strongly suggest pulling all the stuff you want to keep off of that drive, stick it on CD-Rs or the like. Also, you should make yourself a restore point, by going to start > programs > accessories > system tools > system restore. It *might* buy you a bit more time if the drive goes belly-up again.

In future, if you get a new installation going but don't have the CDs to reinstall if needed, you might want to burn yourself a copy of the "Sickies boot DVD", or stick it on a USB drive somewhere and sock it away. It has a lot of useful stuff for virus and fault control on windows systems.

Hope this all makes sense. Let me know if I can help any further!

okay, so I don't know if i'm taking a shot in the dark here or not, but I've got an EHD that the rescued information is going to go onto-

If I were to drop a linux system onto that, boot the EHD first, could I access the internal as a secondary drive then and rescue the docs that way as well? (I'm not too worried about really getting the computer working again. It wasn't meant for art and stuff when I got it 6/7 years ago, and i have been expecting something to start dying on me pretty much since the power supply went a few months ago.)

If you can set up the BIOS to boot from an external hard drive, then yes, you can do that. Not all motherboards let you boot from an external. Good luck!