Windows 2003 missing or corupt ntoskrnl.exe

A Windows 2003 Server was bluescreening with 0x00000007b error, which was a result of p2v conversion (scsi drivers were not injected at the end of the conversion). I no longer have access to a physical machine, so all I have is a virtual that needs to be repaired. Checkdisk identified logical problems on the drive and was able to repair them. After checkdisk finished I am getting

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

Windows root\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I am able to boot in to recovery console from the installation CD, but if I attempt to reintall windows on the top of the existing installation, the installer does not give me an option to repair and wants to install Windows in another directory.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

February 21st, 2015 2:37am

If you still think controller driver issue then you can try loading a controller driver at boot. Edit the boot.ini to give it a correct ARC path for the machine you wish to boot.

In order for this to work you'll want to change the arc path in boot.ini from multi syntax to scsi syntax to indicate that Windows 2003 will load a boot device driver and use that driver to access the boot partition. Then also copy the correct manufacturer controller driver to C:\ but renamed to ntbootdd.sys


 Something like this below;

 [boot loader]
 timeout=10
 default=scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
 [operating systems]
 scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2003 0,1"
 scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2003 0,2"
 scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2003 1,1"
 scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2003 1,2"

 

 

 

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February 21st, 2015 3:31am

does not look like the controller issue.

I can attach Virtual Hard Drive file to another virtual machine and can see all files as they were on the physical machine, however since checkdisk ran it created found.000 folder on the root of C and moved everything from

Windows\system32 folder to found.000 directory.

not sure if this installation can be saved....

February 21st, 2015 3:36am

I'd agree. With those new details you're looking at a clean install.

 

 

 

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February 21st, 2015 3:42am

there were multiple shares on the server and iis.

any way to figure out what the share names were and get the iis metadata out, by exploring the file system or brining the registry files out to another machine?

February 21st, 2015 3:55am

If the \system32 is gone then the registry is also gone. The registry files are in \system32\config\ You can load/search them on another machine if found.

 

 

 

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February 21st, 2015 4:00am

found a Ghost image of the physical machine from 3 years ago

I was able to restore a gho right in to virtual machine, but now I am back to 0x07b error.

this time filesystem is in tact and driver is missing. boot.ini has the following info

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

February 21st, 2015 5:03am

I'd try scsi syntax in boot.ini and load a boot device driver.

 

 

 

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February 21st, 2015 5:13am

was able to install scsi drivers using the reconfigure vm option in the converter app
February 21st, 2015 5:29am

Then could you boot the restored VM correctly now? If there is any further issue, please let us know the situation. 
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February 23rd, 2015 4:15am

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