Lost my boot

I have a dual boot setup (Win2000 and WinXP), working fine until I tried to install drivers for a Rosewill PCI SATA adapter (RC-215). After that every boot(Win2000) gave me an error message that said windows/system32/SYSTEM was missing or corrupt. My WInXP boot was working ok until later that week, when it failed also.

The SYSTEM file wasn't missing, I tried a different one from another Win2000 installation but that just gave me an error message about " load needed dlls for kernel"...so I'm guessing the SYSTEM file is particular to a given installation.

I have Hiren's Boot CD 15.2 which gives me access to the hard drives...everything tests ok, and I've tried a checkMBR program which tells me that it recognizes a valid WinXP boot setup, but says nothing about the Win2000 boot setup

I'm also seeing some weirdness in Drive Management, the order of the partitions(boxes) is changed a bit. Looking in Boot.ini, things look normal also I'm not sure about the partition number listed for the second boot.

I need some basic troubleshooting information for this kind of situation. I'm reluctant to rebuild the MBR without knowing more. Can someone help with this?
 
Thank you for your concern...you'll be happy to know that I have a quad core computer also and it's working splendidly with a newer (to me) version of Windows (WinXP). But the problem is with my older P4 computer and it's booting issues. I've rechecked the boot.ini file closely and it seems to be right so I'm trying to find out what to do next about the loss of access to the computer.

I have Hiren's BootCD 15.2 running, and I ran a program called MBRcheck....it reported "Windows XP MBR code detected" but didn't mention anything about Windows 2000(my primary boot).

I ran the Hiren's version of Disk Management and it shows the C drive as "active" but the partition that has the C drive data is now called H drive. I don't know how that happened, but I'm going to try changing the drive letters and see what happens. Things can't get any worse, and I can always re-install the OS (but many hours setting up all the programs if I do this).

Any suggestions are welcome....
 
XP and Windows 2000 aren't supported by Microsoft any longer. I would suggest that you try and re-install XP fresh, but you may not be able to get the security updates any longer. Windows 7 may be an option for that quad-core computer now
 
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