I’ve run into this problem before, usually after a major hardware upgrade (motherboard), but a couple of times after a drive hiccup.
Let’s hope your file tables are still intact; sometimes it’s just the boot sector or even a single bad file table copy that can cause it not to boot.
There are a two or three you can do to salvage your installation. The first is to see if you can boot into safe mode. If you can, you can run another chkdsk from there, or it may be updated controller drivers from the service pack that caused the problem. You could try to uninstall the service pack, or if that doesn’t work, you could go into the hardware manager and remove the drive controller. This would allow windows to revert to a basic controller and reinstall it upon bootup if that were the problem.
If that doesn’t work, you may still have an actual problem with the drive info. Next would be to try to run another chkdsk. You do this by booting up your win2k installation cd and going into console repair mode. This will allow you a very basic command line to run a chkdsk. Boot up the win2k cd, then select repair instead of install and then you select the command console (don’t remember what it’s actually called and my other pc’s are in use atm to check). You’ll have to put in your administator password and it’ll give you a command line.
Then you can type in chkdsk (drive) /p
This will run another chkdsk. When it’s done, reboot and see if you start up normally.
If not, one other option is a reinstall of windows on top of your old installation. This will prevent you from losing anything; programs, data, everything will still be there and registered. You may just have to do a bunch of windows updates afterward. You start this in the same manner as a regular installation, but you choose to do a repair in the install section of the windows setup. Don’t choose an alternate directory and definitely do not choose to create a new partition or format.
I’ve done it quite a few times for myself and clients to repair a win2k installation that was thought to be lost, but don’t have the exact details on my mind right now. I’ll try to find someone who does and give you a link, or I’ll go back and recreate one on one of these older pc’s so I can give you a detailed list of instructions for it, but it may be tomorrow before I get back to this post.