wIN2K BOOTUP FAIL

[saif]

I think I am very stupid. I have win2k installed on my E: drive but I accidentally deleted C: Although this does not contain windows, it is the "system" drive so my PC will not boot. What can I do? My win2k CD does not boot for some reason. i know nothing about it but I guess I need to copy some files to C so that it will at least do a dirty boot and then "repair" Help me please!!!

[neoboy259]

You need to go into the bios to change the boot order so that the CD drive boots before the hard drive does. From there your win2k cd should boot up and hopefully you can repair your installation from there.

[saif]

I did that. But I get an "ntldr missing". Does not boot from CD

[kazurm]

Do you have a second pc, or a bootdisk (with CDROM support)?

[neoboy259]

You got a floppy drive?
Grab a bootdisk from bootdisk.com and try running the cd from there.

[EvilBoris]

SO is your C drive totally blank?

If so, unplug your E: Drive then do a fresh install to C:.

Strangely I'm in a similar predicament right now

[saif]

Cheers people. My situation is that I have a floppy on the laptop with the prob. But the desktop I am using now has no floppy. Its a laptop so it is only one physical drive but has C,D,E and F partitions.
Anyone know how to make a bootable win2k CD bootdisk. For some reason, my CD wont load from it so I wanna try that. I read some stuff about "Recovery Console" but it does not start.
Changed start order to CD -> removable -> HDD
Wondering if it will boot from a USB device as I have a portable HDD.
I COULD put the HDD in a caddy and access the HDD from my desktop to copy files directly to it but I have NO idea what files are needed.

[EvilBoris]

The files you should need are NTLDR NTDETECT.EXE and BOOT.INI

What happens when you try to boot from the CD?

[saif]

When I boot from the Cd (should say when CD is in) it whirs away and then says missing NTLDR.
My desktop is XP and laptop is 2000. Where can i get files to copy them across?

[yosai]

They are hidden on the C: partition.

info about ntldr

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

[saif]

Are the NTLDR NTDETECT.EXE and BOOT.INI files the only files NEEDED on the C drive to boot into the E drive? I think I'll try and make and get those files onto the C drive. But i need to make some chanhges to the boot.ini file don't I? For my specific system? What dod ik do to that?