ntoskrnl.exe is corrupted. windows wont open

I had a computer with a hard drive not detected last week. After about 6 hours of playing with it, trying to reinstall Windows which oddly worked to a point ) buying a new harddrive, formatting it and installing Windows on it again only to find the new drive not recognized, I took out the CMOS battery for about 15 seconds, plugged it back in and was back in business. I'll probably never know what caused the problem in the first place but it worked.

Ill definately give that a try but I have no idea what a CMOS battery looks like.

It's the small flat round Lithium C3032 battery (or something like that) -- you can't miss it. Added note - If you do remove it, you'll have to reset your system time after you get Windows back.

I am having the same problem with the corrupt or missing file, and I have read all the posts and links from the posts. I guess that I am missing something. I don't understand how to just get a dos prompt and start moving files around. Maybe someone can explain it to me.
I'm running win xp pro, and I have two Maxtor 120gb Sata drives on raid 0.
I'm not sure what the recovery console is or how to get there. I have booted from the xp cd and pressed R for recovery. It sounds like this is a different thing than the "recover console" from some of the links that I read. Anyway, whether I select recover or install from the cdrom, it claims to be examining my hard drive and never finishes. I let it run for 8 hours last night, when I got up this morning it still claimed to be examining. It does see one large 240gb drive which is correct (2X120gb raid0), but jsut never finishes examining. Could it really be taking more than 8 hours to examine a 240gb drive?
So since I can't seem to do anything with the xp cd, I have thought about making a boot disk or something, but I am not sure if that will work. The Sata Drives aren't detected until I put the drivers on. With the xp cdrom it gives me the option to press f6 to install the sata drives. I'm not too proficient in making boot disks. I have seen the option when formatting a floppy in xp. There is probably a way to get the drives to load from a boot up disk, and this would give me a dos prompt, but even if I could get access to the Sata drives, they are NTFS, so I woulnd't be able to browse them anyway would I?
I have a second pc with win xp on it so I can get on the internet, and make disks and cds. I had rather boot from a cd. I didn't even put a floppy drive on my new computer, they are so outdated, I can't believe that we still have to use them. So I am swapping the floppy drive between computers as needed. I would like to make a boot cd that would install the sata drivers, and give me access to move files around is this possible? Is this the wrong direction? What else shoudl I try?
Basically it does not seem as easy to get to the shell and move files around as all the articles and people here are acting like. What am I missing?
Please help, it really sucks to have my pc down. Thanks in advance.
Clay

I put in a new hard drive, installed windows on it, and then tried to access my original 2 Sata raid 0 drives. I can view some of the files. I was hoping to either go in and fix the corrupted files, or at least pull my data off. But I can't access anything in my Documents and Settings folder or the Windows/System32/ntoskrnl.exe file that I need to fix. I am thinking that it may be some kind of windows security thing rather than real corruption. Is this the case? Isn't there any way to get to these files and modify or copy them?
Someone please help me, I am so close to getting my data back, but still so far.

Again, I'll recap what happened to mine, because it may help you recover your data, at the very least.

My original OS that came with the computer was XP Pro. I had no problems with it and quite honestly liked it to an extent, but it had too many quirky conflicts with my Novell network at work so I chose to install 2000 Pro overtop of it. No problems there. Win2K pro installed just fine and I showed up as D Drive and my original XP showed up as C Drive (That was a little odd, but I sorta did that on purpose.

Anyway, I wanted to reinstall the XP Pro as a dual boot and installed System Commander (A multi-boot proggie, to do this). The XP install went off without a hitch, but like everyone else in this thread, when I went to boot Win2K Pro I had this dreaded ntoskrnl file problem just like everyone else. I think as noted earlier, at least my theory is, that the 2000 and XP NTFS are different versions. When XP is installed it looks for other NTFS partitions and attempts to rewrite them to it's own version. The workaround is to "hide" all other NTFS partitions. This way they don't get "rewritten". By default, SYstem Commander hides the NTFS partitions when using the OS wizard, but when I rebooted to start the install, I think I screwed up and as a result the 200 partition became "unhidden". Hence the "corruption".

After careful study of the solutions offered and the same attempts many have made to solve it, I tried a different approach. I created a fourth partition and did a clean install of Win2K being especially careful this time to "hide" the other NTFS partitions.

In theory this worked. It's a bit of a pain, but the end result is I can boot to both of the latter versions of Win2K and XP partitions. When I boot to Win2K (the new version) it is my C Drive and my old "corrupted" Win2K partition became my D Drive. Hence I was able to access all the files from there, but I could not see either XP partition.

However, when I boot to the new version of XP, My new XP partition is my C Drive and the old XP partition is my D Drive.

Bottom line is I was able to recover all files on the computer and not have to format it and start from scratch.

I'm not sure that's within the range of what most are willing to do, but I am living proof that it can be done. If you'd like to take a look at System Commander here's the link:

http://www.v-com.com/
It's not free (but not expensive either), but I like it even better than Partition Magic.

Hope that helps the many who have been having this problem.

I read this three times, and it seems like it should be helpful. but I just don't understand a few things. I don't understand how you hid other installs. I also don't understand how you are able to see all your files while I am not. It seems pretty similar to what I did. Maybe it is because I don't understand what role System commander played in this for you.

System Commander runs on boot and keeps track of MBR and has options for partitioning, either manually or with a wizard, and OS installation wizard. The OS installation wizard automatically detects other NTFS partitions and hides them from the new OS (I guess comparing it to hidden files in DOS might be a good comparision). It's built in to the program, and trufully I'm not certain how it's done. (It can also be done manually in the partitioning portion. As far as seeing the files? Not sure there either. Perhaps it's because I used the same administrator password for all OS installs? I don't know. Hopefully taking ownership of the files will do it for you.

Unfortunately I could not read anything off the drives today. I ran powermax which is a Maxtor disk utility. it told me that both drives are bad. Yes, both drives that are part of my raid array went bad. I asked the guy if that was odd, and he asured me that it was very odd. But offered no explanation. So I am getting two new hard drives. and it turns otu that it was more than jsut a windows secutiry issues.
I guess that my problem has changed, does anyone know of any good data recovery software that will work on a raid 0 configuration?

I am having a problem when installing Win 2k3 Server. When my system reboots for the first time during the install process, I get a blue screen telling me that the Windows cannot find the proper installation. The install is an upgrade from Win 2K Server. When it reboots again after getting this message, I get an error saying that the NTOSKRNL.EXE file is either corrupt or doesn't exist.

Does anybody have any ideas as to why this is happening?

Ok,I've tried a couple of things with no use untill I found this topic but just when JrzyCrim gave me the answer the repair console gives me a message "access denied" to the windows folder,now what?My missing file is c:\windows\system32\config\system and even when I'm in DOS mode there is no such folder as the config folder,totally messed up,any help will be appreciated.

Come on guys!At least give me a link or something!

Patience my friend. This thread started May 10th and people are still answering questions about it. Trust me, when someone here thinks they can offer a good suggestion, they will post it. At the moment, I can't think of anything that hasn't already been suggested or I would have offered something. I've been kicking it around in the back of my mind for the last hour or so.

Hang in there. You've come to a great place for help.

Well I'm happy that there is at least one man alive here ,I was worried that this thread is forgotten already,now I can wait more calmly .

This is a tough problem. My workstation at the office still has a Win2k partition with this problem, that I haven't fixed yet either, in spite of all the suggestions already made. Believe me, if I can figure it out, this thread will be the first place I come to to post the solution.