Windows 2000 Loader Error 3

[aaaach]

I would like to report on my experience with the following message appearing on boot up, which I received at one point without doing anything major to the computer, from what I can tell: Windows 2000 could not start because of an error in the software. Please report this problem as Loader Error 3.

 

While searching microsoft.com for loader error 3 windows 2000 yields a lot of results, searching for the exact message yields only one article: 277222 (System may not start when creating a large number of logical units and volumes). Since that article appeared not to be very useful, and relating to the server edition of windows 2000, I did not look into it very carefully.

 

I then have looked into various other online sources and have seen various courses of actions taken. I have chosen to act based on a comment by lcruisader at another forum (this page has a lot of comments for this problem), who said replacing ntldr located in the root with backup resolved the problem, since I had another computer with xp home avaliable, although not the Windows 2000 install cd.

I proceeded to replace ntldr after booting live into ubuntu. As a result, when I rebooted, I received another message, saying that winnt\system32\config\system is corrupted, which, I later noticed, was very similar to one of the alternate messages given in the microsoft article, except the file corrupted was not system.ced, but system.

 

I think that a different version of ntldr was able to diagnose a corrupted file, which basically is the "loader error 3". It's important to know which file became corrupted, and trying to replace possibly corrupted files or drivers with backups or newer versions after backing those files up could be helpful.

 

So I booted again with live ubuntu and browsed to winnt\system32\config\ and found the system file, which was 4.9 mb. I looked for a backup file in the same directory, and there was a file also 4.9 mb in size, named SYSTEM.ALT. So I renamed it to system after renaming the system file itself and then rebooted, which solved the problem.

[Goku]

Thanks for posting the solution Aaach. I am sure it will come in handy sometime later. By the way, I think that the file named NTLDR (New Technology Loader) must have been corrupted and that is why you received the error? Is this right?

 

-- Goku

[aaaach]

I don't think it was the NTLDR file that became corrupted, since after I replaced there still was another corrupted file - system. However, it is possible that both of these files for some reason became corrupted. I think it is more probable that a newer version of NTLDR was able to detect a corrupt file necessary for Windows to load.

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Well I must congratulate you on solving your own problem, a problem that a lot of pc users wouldn't have the foggiest idea about.

 

Please continue to enlighten us with your wisdom.