HELP!

I was experiencing some buggieness in a previously stable and solid Win2K install,
SP4 about a week ago.

The symptoms were mainly that just after startup, if I opened more than 1 browser in
Explorer 6, the CPU use would suddenly shoot up to 100% or nearly so and the machine
would run like it was in molasses for 10-20 minutes. Mind you, this is an HP Vectra
Workstation VL400MT, with a PIII 866 and 384 ram, usually a real screamer for my
needs, so it was odd it was bogging down this way. Sometimes it would slow down
after hours of surfing again, but it mainly was in the first half hour after reboot.

I used a startup manager to see if anything was turning into a memory hog:
temporarily helped but the problem came back. I had upgraded some of my Norton
Utilities and Antivirus, but that did NOT show up in task manager as eating all the
CPU time, Explorer did.

I had some suspicion that there might be a Trojan Horse or some spyware involved, so
I swept the machine, but only found one minor item, which I pulled. No difference.

Then I said, what the heck, pull out the ole Win2K disk and run Repair, that should
clean this up. Well, towards the end, I started getting some weird messages. The
Repair program said "cannot copy the file NTDETECT.COM" and asked if I wished to
retry. I selected yes many times to no avail, so I hit escape to skip and the same
thing happened 3 more times, for NTLDR, ARCSETUP & ARCLDR. Repeated running of
Repair got same messages, even with a different CD!

now when I try to startup, I get "NTLDR not found" error and it tells me to hit
control-alt-delete to restart. I formatted a spare drive, did a clean install and
booted from that drive. The original drive shows up fine, no errors, but the only
copies of the missing files are in NT i386. I tried making copies to the NT folder
and the WINDOWS folder, to no avail.

then I found a post on the NTLDR error that suggested using the repair console to
fix the boot sectors. OK, this MUST be it! I run fixboot, once, twice. First time it
does say it found corruption, but I am NOT sure I am on the right volume, as both
disks are still in the machine. I reboot with ONLY the bad install active and rerun
Fixboot. It says "new boot sector written successfully". I think, "oh boy", now I
can go back to my system.

NO! STILL SAME ERROR!

What gives? How do I restore these files and TO WHERE ?? I see reference to the root
volume but I am too inexperienced to know what that means.

Help. REPLY HERE OR VIA EMAIL, remove my antispam!

David

PS: when windows formatted the spare 1.2gig disk, it made a 15meg volume, why ? And
why do I get a startup message saying I have Win98 AND win2k, which do I want, when
I boot ? I never asked for the extra partition or installed Win 98. Does the
installer create an invisible partition to run itself from ? Can I recover the 15
megs ??