Did defrag corrupt my OS?

[zeppelin]

I have a dual boot system on a single hard drive.
I recently defragged my HD in Windows 98. I chose to defrag only the Win98 partition, but I think it defragged the entire drive. Tonight, I booted into W2K, everything went fine, but 10 min. into the session, it just completely froze. I rebooted, and it said that my "ntoskrnl.exe" is either missing or corrupt. What's going on?????

My setup.
Primary Partition 1 (small): FAT, holds system commander and master boot record.
Primary Partition 2: NTFS, hold W2K OS
Primary Partition 3: FAT32, hold Win98 OS
Extended Partition, Logical 1: FAT32, holds all my programs.
Logical 2: FAT32, holds everything else (downloads, documents, etc.)

 

[StuckMojo]

doh

the "ntoskrnl.exe" error is VERY misleading! what it really means is that your NT boot loader is fux0red

boot from the win2k cd and choose repair, then "inspect startup environment" and that should fix everything.

if not, you can reinstall overtop and it will keep all your settings (just like 98 did), but you may have to reinstall any third party drivers and such. (but your programs and desktop, etc will be fine!)

like 98, if you reinstall overtop (and DONT choose "clean install&quot it keeps the software hive of your registry and just replaces the system hive (thats where the hardware stuff is, like drivers, etc)

so you should be back in business in 20-30 min