windows cannot start error

[AK]

hello and thank you to whomever takes the time to read
this.

i have a 3 year old dell running w2k pro at work that is
only used for word
processing and excel. its not part of a network or
connected to the web.
no files are transferred from other machines.

yesterday, it booted fine and i did a letter in word and
then closed word
and only desk top was up. i left my office for less than
a minute and when
i came back i had the follwing message.

stop: c0000021a unknown hard error

the text under the message mentioned any new hardware and
if this is the
first timefor this error to reboot. nothing has been put
in or taken out of
the machine since we got it. so i did a soft boot and
now i have the
message:

windows 2000 cannot start because the following file is
missing or
corrupt:\winnt\system32\config\systemced

i searched the knowledge base at home and found an article
(269075)
pertaining to this and how to use the recovery console to
rename the system
files to old. i went back last night and when i try to
do this i get the
message that the specific file cannot be found. an
emergency recovery disk
was never made when the person who i just replaced got
the machine, so i
can't try a fast repair under set up. i've tried all the
dell diagnostic
utilities and i'm totally stumped. any ideas/solutions
would be extremely
appreciated. also, will a floppy formatted on xp work on
w2k pro? i found
a place to download the 4 bootdisk for w2k.

 

[Pegasus]

Please do not multi-post - it wastes everybody's time.
See here: http://www.aspfaq.com/5003. If you wish to
reach a larger audience, use cross-posting instead.
Check the replies to your original post.