andrew kauffman

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.