Bizarre boot problem with new WD 120 gig drive. Help, please.

After installing W2K, I began experiencing a bizarre boot problem.

I am getting the error message "System32\NTOSKRNL.EXE is either missing or
corrupt", and the machine won't boot. However, if I give it the 3 finger
salute,
it reboots just fine. I can't seem to reproduce the problem except on the
very
first boot up of the day, after it has been sitting all night. After that
the
hard drive works fine.

Sounds like the computer is ready for data off the hard drive before it is
up to speed. Doubt that it is the power supply as you said it was working
fine on the other drive. You amy be able to go into the cmos setup and set
it so that it counts the memory when you start it up (disable fast startup).
This will slow it down somewhat on the startup and give the dirve time to
get up to speed.

"mrsfixit" wrote
in :
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003 12:19:00 -0500, "Ralph Mowery"
wrote:

After installing W2K, I began experiencing a bizarre boot problem.

I am getting the error message "System32\NTOSKRNL.EXE is either
missing or corrupt", and the machine won't boot. However, if I give
it the 3 finger salute, it reboots just fine. I can't seem to
reproduce the problem except on the very first boot up of the day,
after it has been sitting all night. After that the hard drive
works fine.

Sounds like the computer is ready for data off the hard drive before
it is up to speed. Doubt that it is the power supply as you said it
was working fine on the other drive. You amy be able to go into the
cmos setup and set it so that it counts the memory when you start it
up (disable fast startup). This will slow it down somewhat on the
startup and give the dirve time to get up to speed.

Ralph,
I will certainly give this a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

I just checked my BIOS, and it is listed as Quick Boot. I disabled it.

However, I won't get a chance to test it until Tuesday.

I'll let you know if it works.

Candice

mrsfixit3
at
yahoo
dot
com

Might also want to check if your primary hard drive (for booting) is at
the *end* of the IDE cable if you are using cable select. Otherwise,
configure the drives as master and slave if they are on the same IDE
port, or both as master if on different IDE ports. Make sure the boot
order in BIOS matches your hardware configuration (so the OS isn't
trying to boot off the second physical hard drive and the first just has
data files).

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