Filesystem Corruption Booting Windows 2000 0x24 Blue Screen

First of all, if you can move the hard drive to another computer that is your best bet. Move it to another working computer and run scandisk/chkdisk on it and try to repair it. If anything, get it to where you can get what you want off of it.

In my case, the operating system is installed on a Raid 5 array behind an Adaptec controller so there is no moving this to another computer. The problem I was having is a blue screen half way through Windows 2000 startup which I determined was most likely the result of filesystem corruption. The blue screen was a 0x24 in ntfs.sys.

The first thing you can try is running the Recovery Console. Now, this becomes an issue because you need to run Windows 2000 setup which tries to load any NTFS filesystems at "Starting Windows 2000." You'll most likely get the blue screen here also. To stop Windows from trying to load the corrupt NTFS filesystem, create the 4 boot disks and modify the first boot disk. Comment the line "ntfs=ntfs.sys" in the txtsetup.sif file on the first setup disk. This allowed it successfully to make it to the setup screen. Make sure and press F6 at the beginning of Windows 2000 setup if you need to specify any additional hard drive drivers, as in my case.

Once at the setup screen, press F10 to go into the Recovery Console. You want to make sure you don't run dir here. You'll most likely get a blue screen and you don't have any NTFS filesystems loaded anyway. Simply run chkdsk c: /p at the RC command prompt and then exit to reboot. The chkdsk utility has its own NTFS support and does not require the ntfs.sys driver that we stopped from loading.

If that doesn't work, your next option is to stick in another disk (preferably some IDE disk) and install Windows 2000 to that. Then, you can hopefully try and repair the corrupt disk from within Windows 2000 with the normal Windows utilities or some other utility. When you are done you can remove the temporary disk and change the boot disk back to the once corrupted disk.