I was able to get rid of this problem by booting off of the Win2k setup disk and going into the Recovery Console and then running a FIXBOOT. Everything then runs fine for one or two boot cycles and then the problem reappears.
I have also tried running an exhaustive CHKDSK from the Recovery Console, as well as a FIXMBR. I have also copied over the BOOTLDR from the setup disk in case mine has become corrupt.
Everytime it goes away it just comes back, but FIXBOOT always fixes it (at least temporarilly).
The laptop had its hard drive upgraded about 2 months ago. We used Casper XP to copy the original 40GB drive to an 80GB drive. There were no problems with the new drive for 2 months until about 10 days ago. When the first "Loader Error 3" problem occurred, we checked the drive to find that there was a second partition on it - about 64MB with some system files. This partition was probably a copy of a diagnostic partition on the original 40GB drive, that had been copied along and increased in size proportinately when Casper XP was used on the drive. This partition has since been deleted and the "boot.ini" file has been updated to point to the correct partition. Again the problem is easily fixed by booting from the CD
and into recovery console, then using "fixboot" and rebooting the computer. When you shut down again, the "Loader Error 3" occurs and we need to run "fixboot" again. It's just annoying right now and the computer will have a fresh Windows install performed in 2 weeks, but the problem is occurring for one of
our field engineers and it is annoying. We are concerned about potential data loss like this. Again, any suggestions would be helpful.
Thanks
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