RIGHT TO THE CHIN

here's what you need to do...

1. unplug the PC
2. set it on fire
3. roll it down a hill
4. get an apple and never look back

you should be able to boot the win2k install disk and there should be some sort of repair option (I think). If not try making a rescue disk on a nother win2k machine. That failing copy ntoskrnl.exe from another machine to disk (if it fits) or maybe cd and find your local tech geek that has windows bootable floppies for almost any windows os as long as they have cdrom support if you have to cp ntoskr... to cd you can boot the system and see your hard drive and then insert disk and copy file to w32 dir.

Most importantly. After backing up important documents switch to linux or mac (if you're not a hopeless geek like myself).

if the cd thing doesnt work, here's what I've done:

get a new harddrive and install win2k or whatever on it. use your old drive with the bad boot sector as a secondary drive (you should be able to connect to it even tho you cant boot from it), copy all the old stuff to the new one, format the old one and use it as an MP3 drive, or throw it away.

The ntoskrnl.exe isn't part of the boot sector. It's a windows system file. A rather protected one at that. It sounds like you may have caught a virus or, even worse, may have a failing drive. If you install Win2k without reformatting, you should be good to go. You won't lose any information and may have to re-install some programs that rely on the registry to run (since you will have a fresh copy of the registry). If you choose to reinstall this way, get it to a point where you can make a good backup (or throw the drive in another machine to back it up) and then reformat and reinstall. If you reinstall without reformatting, things can sometimes get a little cluttered and affect system performance. If you need more specific help, feel free to e-mail me or something as this comment thing is just a little awkward for tech support.