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Activate Acronis Secure Zone and ntoskrnl.exe goes missing or corrupt

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Hello All, I am trying to do something very basic here. I have two partions: C:\ where my active Windows XP OS resides and D:\ where my backup exists. I can borrow the minimum (about 39.33 MB) to put the Secure Zone on either C:\ or D:\, and as long as I don't activate the Secure zone, everything is fine: I can smoothly boot from C:\, reimage, without any issue. Of course, without Secure Zone activated, I need a CDROM drive and the bootable media to reimage. However, I don't want to use all that extra hardware (CDROM drive, CD, etc..) and since F11 should normally allow the user to reimage directly from D:\, I want to go that route. So I activate the Secure Zone and reboot. As soon as I reboot, I first get the "Press the F11 key" prompt, but then I run into those windows errors: "Cannot start Windows. ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall' Any ideas? My PC is an 20GB solid state drive running Windows XP Professional. Please help.

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Hello Jackly,

I understand the question and will do everything possible from my side to solve the issue and explain the source of it.

First of all you have mentioned that you are using SSD drive. You should note that using Acronis products you can perform the same operations with SSDs as with regular hard disk drives. However I would recommend you to read some research by other forum members concerning SSD drives.

ntoskrnl.exe is the kernel image for the family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It provides the Kernel and Executive layers of the Windows NT kernel space, and is responsible for various system services such as hardware virtualization, process and memory management, etc., thus making it a fundamental part of the system. It contains the Cache Manager, the Executive, the Kernel, the Security Reference Monitor, the Memory Manager, and the Scheduler, among other things.

In order to solve the issue please do the following:

  1. Insert the Microsoft Windows XP CD. Note: If you have a recovery CD or a restore CD and not a Microsoft Windows XP CD it is likely the below steps will not resolve your issue.
  2. Reboot the computer, as the computer is starting you should see a message to press any key to boot from the CD. When you see this message press any key.
  3. In the Microsoft Windows XP setup menu press the R key to enter the recovery console.
  4. Select the operating system you wish to fix, and then enter the administrator password.
  5. Type expand d:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32
  6. You will then be prompted if you wish to overwrite the file type Y and press enter to overwrite the file.
  7. Type exit to reboot the computer.

Activation of Acronis Secure Zone under Windows lead to ntoskrnl.exe corruption so I may recommend you to use Acronis bootable disc to overcome the issue as it is based on Linux OS and can handle all disk management operations better.

You haven’t mentioned the program so please clarify the exact title of the Acronis software you are using. If you are not using the latest build (check it in help -> about) you may want to update to it.  I am not certain if the issue is addressed in the new build at this point, however it is generally a good idea to be up to date.

Let us know the results.

Thank you.