Missing or corrupt file

[beanhead07]

Hey guys, I just started having trouble with my computer earlier today. I built the PC myself and it has always worked fine. All of a sudden today it quit booting up. When I turned the PC on it did all the normal hardware checks and everything, but then it just went to a blank screen. I am running dual operating systems and usually it would give me a choice of which OS to use but the screen was just blank. I checked the boot sequence in the BIOS and turned out that the HDD was last on the list so I moved it up to first and I could then choose the OS to use but when I chose Windows XP it came up with an error that said <Windows root>\System32\ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt and to run the XP installation cd to repair it. I don't know what happened to cause this error. I use the PC all the time and it just started doing this today. The only change I have made on my PC recently was installing an extra hard drive. I made sure the jumper settings were correct. I didn't realize that there was already on operating system on this extra hard drive until I booted up the PC after installing it. The PC went into an endless cycle of reboots trying to load more than one OS at a time. So I unplugged the extra HDD and just stuck with my old one. It was after this that I noticed my PC messing up and then just quit working. All this to say that I have no clue how to use the repair feature of the installation disk. I thought it was an automatic "find the problem and fix it" solution. I don't know which option to choose in the menus of the repair section of the disk. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Here are my system specs...

2.8 GHz Pentium 4
4 GB DDR2 RAM
500GB HDD
450W PSU
NVidia Gefore 8500GT
Windows XP Professional
Windows Vista Ultimate

If there was anything I missed in my specs that might help let me know. Sorry this post was so long but thanks in advance for any help! Hope all this made sense.

[beanhead07]

Quick update... now it's telling me that another file is corrupt or missing. I'm thinking it's going to be easier to reformat the hard drive. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that cause I've got a lot of files I'm going to lose... oh well. Such is life.

[xcharge50]

Wait! Do you have a xp cd? If yes use it to boot from this cd
After try recovery console an copy all the corrupt file from the cd in the partition of you boot

[Geek-9pm]

Which version of XP do you have?
Do you have the XP install CD? And the drivers for XP?
What is the size of both drives.
What was on the strange drive you stuck in?
Maybe you can just pull out the drive you want to save nd then format the strange drive and see if you can do a clean install on it. Later you can copy files off of your injured drive.

[beanhead07]

I am using XP Professional and Vista Ultimate, but niether of them will boot. Vista I'm not worried about losing any info from. I just installed that about a week or so ago and don't really have anything on it. Thankfully I've backed up most of my files that I really want from XP but I do a lot of gaming and I have a lot of saved files that I'd love to keep. It's not the end of the world if I lose it but if I don't have to that would be great. I do have the XP install CD and the Vista install CD. I also have all the drivers I'll need. My main drive is 500GB and the extra drive was a 250GB. Honestly I don't know how long the extra drive has been laying around but I got a scrap computer from my dad and it had a HDD that wasn't being used and it was a 250GB. So when I tried putting it in my PC it tried to boot from the 500GB and then it would restart and boot from the other drive etc... I think it was a Windows server OS but it just restarted to soon for me to really see for sure. I booted from the XP recovery disk and went into the repair mode but it gave me a list of like 20-something different commands and I have no idea which one I'm needing to do. I might try to format the smaller drive and see if I can't get any info off the old one before I reformat. Xcharge I didn't completely understand your post. What is the recovery console? I'm not too familiar with the recovery and repair features of the installation cds. Thanks again for the help guys!

[Geek-9pm]

The recovery console lets you do repair to the system
when it does not work right.
Here is a link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

You can delete a partition, create a new one and format it.

You did not say if you are using PATA drives, the old IDE type.
You can not put XP sp1 on the large drive.

[beanhead07]

Thanks for the link. I will definitely read through that before I reformat anything. Sorry I did forget to mention that both drives are PATA. I have Windows XP Pro SP2. Like I said both operating systems were working fine and then just the other day they just quit working. I guess they have a mind of their own sometimes. Thanks for the link again and for all the help!