Hi thanks very much for your help Jim. And yes i've been using the ntoskrnl.exe file from the dllcache. Still to no avail unfortuantly, i also tried rewriting my boot.ini file, again unfortuantly to no avail. This is a strange problem. I'm thinking it might not be a problem with the boot.ini no though. Because when win2000 tries to load i get the win2000 loading screen with progress bar start then i get the error message if my boot.ini points to partition 2 however if it is changed it just goes straight to the error message. NO loading screen. Sigh, this is a tough one, i've checked the directory and ntoskrnl.exe is in e:\winnt\system32. I've even tried creating new winnt\system32 paths with ntoskrnl.exe in them in my other partitions still no luck. I also have not created an ERD since installing sp1 (dang nam it! )
so i'm still stuck, i'm going to keep trying but if can't fix it soon. I guess it's time to Format