Did the blue screen of death kill my Windows 2000 professional workstation?

My Windows 2000 professional workstation is unable to boot, or rather it is constantly rebooting after the first Windows 2000 splashscreen. It is trying to show a failing device, but the time to read the information is far too short. I tried to use the repair console and disabled some services, but to no avail.

My problems started when I was confronted with the following:
filerecordsegment 24194 with record description 128 has been deleted
filerecordsegment 24813 and 25268 has been deleted

Finally, I got a blue screen of death showing me that Windows 2000 had a problem with atapi.sys.

At first I was able to reboot the system (after a couple of retries) and thought this was over. But then during Internet browsing, something happened. The browser froze up, some file was deleted, and the computer went down. Since then I can't get Windows 2000 running. I am able to run in recovery console. I did run chkdsk twice. The first time errors were reported, but the second time all was fine, but Windows 2000 would not boot properly. Of course I tried all modes. Please help!

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Looks like you've corrupted a key system file. The fact that the ATAPI driver was implicated in the bugcheck (blue screen) only serves to reinforce that assumption. Does the machine have a caching controller? Hardware caching often conflicts with the Windows 2000 file cache, causing problems similar to yours. Other issues might be incompatibilities with your motherboard or chipset. Is this a vendor machine or one you built yourself?

Try performing a parallel install of Windows 2000 to another partition, if one is available, or another drive (you may need to install one.) If you're able to get the system up and running, you can either spend time copying system files into the old partition (make sure you run the same service pack) or just continue to run from the second installation.

This was first published in October 2001

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