Walked in to work at 6:45 today to get an early start. Read some emails and – as the computer seemed sluggish, I decided a reboot would refresh the memory and perhaps help things out. Sometimes the network is slow, but this seemed to be the machine itself – switching between windows from email to Homesite or other functions seemed to take forever. Did the restart and … uh – oh …

“can’t find system root/system32/ntoskrnl.exe” …. that can’t be good! I tried a few more time, no change. Called tech support to let them have at it for a while … whoops, wrong day – its Moving Day – some of our group is being moved to the other building and the Help Desk folks have their hands full … sigh … But I did get someone to help and I sat quietly by and let him sort through it. After numerous boots via floppy and Win2k CD, I got him to try and copy a fresh version of the NTOSKRNL file into the correct directory.

By 2:45 tech support called to check on me and seemed surprised that it wasn’t up yet. I offered an alternate approach. I’d bring a spare Hard drive in from home, wiped clean to avoid any potential viral threats. We put it in my machine as a new C drive, connect the original drive as D and do a quick Win2000 install, just to get it running with the Windows GUI – then we could compare things, virus check it, copy files, whatever, to get it back up. They liked the idea, so well that we’ll try that strategy tomorrow! Wish me luck – I don’t have time to be down!