W2K pro setup/emergency disks fail

[In]

Began with a hardware removal problem: couldn't boot into
safe mode to remove some Zip drivers. Could boot normally
until s-ata drive in bios went from primary master to 3rd
master and I found partition drive letters changed--
particularly the system drive letter. Finally worked with
Bios to get my hard drive recognized as primary master
again but when I tried to boot up with setup and emergency
repair disks made 10 days ago, I get almost through W2K
setup when it asks me to provide the nt5cat.inf file from
the SP 4 cd. I've never had a SP4 cd, but the W2K cd
doesn't work either.

I make a new installation of W2K on the same drive as the
original and find I can do it by just the files in \winnt2
which lets me find the nt5cat.inf file, save it to floppy
and reboot my original installation. W2K setup swallows
the nt5cat.inf file OK, but now it asks for NT5.cat file
and fails me with an error 1 again. Repeating the last
operation I find the NT5 in winnt\system32\catroot
directory, go back to the setup in the original
installation but it won't accept the file in the path I've
found.

Any suggestions about how I could get my original
installation to boot? The safe modes all lead back to the
same setup catch 22. The repair and recovery attempts
don't work. I can change the drive letter back from the
new installation but that may not work and it will make
the new installation unbootable.

 

[Gert B. Frob]

Began with a hardware removal problem: couldn't boot into
safe mode to remove some Zip drivers. Could boot normally
until s-ata drive in bios went from primary master to 3rd
master and I found partition drive letters changed--
particularly the system drive letter. Finally worked with
Bios to get my hard drive recognized as primary master
again but when I tried to boot up with setup and emergency
repair disks made 10 days ago, I get almost through W2K
setup when it asks me to provide the nt5cat.inf file from
the SP 4 cd. I've never had a SP4 cd, but the W2K cd
doesn't work either.

I make a new installation of W2K on the same drive as the
original and find I can do it by just the files in \winnt2
which lets me find the nt5cat.inf file, save it to floppy
and reboot my original installation. W2K setup swallows
the nt5cat.inf file OK, but now it asks for NT5.cat file
and fails me with an error 1 again. Repeating the last
operation I find the NT5 in winnt\system32\catroot
directory, go back to the setup in the original
installation but it won't accept the file in the path I've
found.

Any suggestions about how I could get my original
installation to boot? The safe modes all lead back to the
same setup catch 22. The repair and recovery attempts
don't work. I can change the drive letter back from the
new installation but that may not work and it will make
the new installation unbootable.

If you NEED your original installation, I would try removing the second
installation and doing an in-place upgrade on the first. See this link:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292175

Otherwise, start over with a fresh install.