Win2k Ntoskrnl.exe corruption

hello all
Ive just spent most of my day trying to fix my boss`s windows 2k machine, which i was thinking of moving to untill the little problem today.

ok, the day before i found out that his brother was on windowsxp.nu downloading files (exe format)

roughly 2pm today, it gave up a login screen, after he logged in it gave "drive C: not formatted" in an error box, so i clicked no, the system eventually ground to a halt afer that, so i restarted, and windows gave me a corrupted ntoskrnl.exe and that i needed to replace the file, after that VMM*.vxd/dll files were corrupted too

Scandisk brought up bad clusters, and crashed serveral times

i eventually was told to install windows XP on his system, as he needed on to check his emails, and was thinking about it for a while anyway.

Anyway what i was wanting to ask, is could this be a result of accientaly running XP files in 2k, some kind of virus (of which iam unaware, as im quite up to date wiht that), or is my boss`s hard drive on its last legs and heading for failure?

And no he didnt keep backups of his important files, if he had done so, mebe i wouldnt have been all shakey trying to fix it (he was quite abusive to his brother and i felt like hiding :D)

thats in advance

Preep

oh and i just found out he had an evaluation copy, does that have a eval period? could this be a windows protection scheme? it was his brother that installed that too

Preep

Hmmm, He had an eval copy of Windows 2000? Weird... Its prolly a virus or as you suspected XP files in 2000

If it's an eval, the ones I have are between 90 and 120 day. I've never reached the end on one yet due to system crashes.

Hmmm, I did some searching and I just realized that your dumb friend downloaded a windows XP boot screen and kernel package (ntsokrnl.exe) this corrupted the 2k kernel and it shitted itself

yeah he was messing with XP bootscreens, thaks acid, i thoguht evaluation ran out ran out but it was 1-2 weeks since he installed it, i had to replace my boss`s 30 GIG with a 1.5gig runing win98, its totally messed, i cant reformat it or rerun an fdisk, keeps going back to zero (scandisk does the same)
thanks fellas

Acid do you have a link so i can prove his dumbness? :D

Preep

Sorry... No links, just tell him that the ntsoknrl file of windows 2000 and XP are completely different ans the XP file has link to the login screen (logonui) so you can edit it while windows 2000 does not