this one is tricky!, and as I am not up on the inner
workings of the NTFS scheme of things and how it interacts
with the BIOS, Cylinders and heads and such, I am sure
I'll get some of this wrong.
the file isnt Missing, do a search for it, after you
get it to boot with an NTFS reader/boot disk (rare as
hen's teeth, but there is a russian site with an Emergency
Boot CD, that used to do the trick.
Anyway,
what happens is (and here the theory gets fuzzy for me)
the NTFS Equivalent of the FAT Table, you know the table
that is on the hard drive that tells where each file
actually IS on the hard drive, gets out of synch with
reality. I seem to remember this as being because of the
number of entires in the table, and its maximum size. This
then causes the BIOS to 'split' the table to TWO physical
locations, and the OS is looking for the file in the wrong
one!
I believe that I booted to the Recovery Console, and then
use the fixboot command to rewrite the Windows 2000 boot
code.
See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;318728
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;812492
Somewhere in this mess is the answer.
metatron