disk I/O Error

Thank you , i am in the midst of conducting an extended test, and waiting for results. Do you have any  idea what DOS command I use to get back to Windows when the test is done? every thing I try says bad command

Thanks for your reply.

mindmax

You're likely going to have to back up your data, and format and reinstall WIndows.
Before you do, boot the Dell diagnostics CD to rule out a hard drive failure as the cause - test the hard drive before you reinstall.

 

exit?

 

Hi,

Before reinstalling you might try this ...

 Reason : by default all Dell's came with 2 partitions .. one for maintenance ... and one fr the operating system ...

 For some unknown reason (known only by Dell ... probably) the boot.ini file from your operating system partition had been deleted ...

 The only thing you have to do is boot from a floppy disk (if you have a FAT32 partition ) and copy the boot.ini file which should look like the following :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

It's important that 2 because you are booting from the second partition ...

You don't need to do anything else ... this should solve all your problems ...

Best regards,

 Alin

PS: you might as well copy the boot.ini file onto the %windows folder% ... by default if boot.ini is not found onto the C drive Windows will search it onto the Windows folder ... and you won't get into the same problem again ... good luck ...

mindmax, have you read the post that win2000 does not support hyper threading? if by any chance, you are fresh installing win2000 on your system, you might want to disable hyper threading support through bios.

if you want to access boot.ini file, it's not possible to do it through searching, but you can go to control panel, system, and under the tab advanced, click settings (under startup and recovery), and click the edit tab. that should get you to the elusive boot.ini file, and you can change the no.2 as suggested.

maybe you can tell us more about your system, when you say you boot, has it always been okay until one day for unknown reason, it can't boot, or?

Hi mindmax ,

As for the issues such as "Disk I/O error" and your computer cannot start (ntoskrnl.exe), you may want to check the following new Microsoft Knowledge Base articles.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=317050

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=841382

Hope this helps.