Booting into Dos

[FrankieB]

I have a slight problem thats bothering the crap outta me. On my Gateway, I changed my boot screen (i believe the file is called ntoskrnl.exe or somethin like that). Well, after rebooting my machine to see if it worked (which it did), right after the boot screen goes away the computer restarts. Now I cant boot it into safe mode, or any kind of safe mode for that matter, because that ntoskrnl.exe or whatever is always the first driver to run, resulting in a reboot everytime that file gets finished running. I know there is a way, but i cant remember how, but i want to get to a dos prompt before windows starts running, so i can find this file, delete it, find the original and rename it so everything will run normally again. can someone please help me with this, i am trying to avoid reformatting my hard drive as i have a lot of precious graphic design work on my machine. any help will be appreciated!

FrankieB

[meese]

What os are you using? Usually tapping the F8 key will stop the booting process and give you boot options.

[Peter M]

You have an NT flavor Windows there, NT, 2K, or XP. There is no DOS underneath. The missing ntoskrnl.exe _is_ the operating system core; if that's gone, you've killed it.

Reinstallation time ...

[eagle1]

If you have a copy of ntoskrnl in the root directory (Windows or WINNT , etc.) you can boot to windows using the recovery console option!
Just boot with your windows CD on the cd drive and do as if you were going to install windows again but instead choose the recovery console option.

Now, it will ask you for the admin password. Enter it and you will see a prompt.!
I think you will go to c:\windows directory automatically.
Check if you can delete the file and restore the back up.!

GOOD LUCK!

[Bill in SD, CA]

Mine is located in C:\WINNT\system32 and also in the i386 folder so I would think that recovery should not be a problem.

Bill