Today while in the process of getting graphics done for a client, I am told that the website I am referring is down. I had my offspring all day so I did not check my servers. Sure enough, my Windows 2000 Web server had crashed. I removed the offending CPU fan and rebooted only to run up on this error:

windows won’t start because file missing or corrupt
windows/system32/config/SYSTEM missing or corrupt

I spend the better part of 3 hours trying to find a solution. I could not do a dirty install because windows could not find the OS on the drive. Would not perform a clean install because I would spend 2 days getting this server back online. So I hit Google for solutions. After some floundering I found that I could copy the system file from the c:/winnt/repair folder from the recovery console. Launched repair console, tried to copy my system file, got “file cannot be copied” error. I used ERD Commander by Winternals to get into the server and copy the file, and that failed!:evil: Now I’m pissed because I think I have to do a clean install on this server. One more swipe at Google and I discovered that I did not perform a checkdisk in the recovery console

I got into the recovery console once again and ran the checkdisk command:

chkdsk /r /p
where
/p Check even if the drive is not flagged dirty, bad.

/r Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /p).

Let that run for about 40 minutes and done Server back in operation.

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Filed under: Windows 2000 server