To my amazement, the system booted just fine. (The Microsoft article "Using System.alt to Recover the System Hive" at discusses this solution.) Then, I crossed my fingers, rebooted, and selected the original installation in the boot loader screen.
I renamed the system file to system.bak, and I renamed the system.alt file to system.
You can use the system.alt file to recover the system hive. I discovered that along with the C:\winnt\system32\config\system file is a file called C:\winnt\system32\config\system.alt.
I could finally access the NTFS 5.0 (NTFS5) boot partition and try to determine which file was corrupted and how to fix the system without fully reinstalling the OS and applications.
Next, I performed a parallel installation of Win2K Pro to a directory other than C:\winnt (i.e., C:\winntfix).
But the install routine couldn't locate a current installation of Win2K because I didn't have a current Emergency Repair Disk (ERD). I attempted a repair installation by booting from the Win2K Professional CD-ROM. I didn't want to reinstall Win2K and all my applications and recreate my Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) Favorites. I assumed that ced was junk that got appended to the error message. I thought the message was odd because this filename doesn't exist. I couldn't boot the machine, and I received an error message saying the C:\winnt\system32\config\SYSTEMced file was corrupted. I don't know why the registry was even open at the time. But the fourth time my computer halted, the C:\winnt\system32\config\system registry file got corrupted. Each time, I was able to hard reset the machine and boot Windows 2000. I received the error message HARDWARE MALFUNCTION, the system has halted-Contact your hardware vendor. On one occasion, my computer crashed three times in less than 15 minutes. I figured that the BIOS must enter a system halt routine to prevent further data corruption. I emailed technical support for SuperMicro (the manufacturer of my Intel 810-based motherboard), but I couldn't get a straight answer to explain the cause of the system halt. Apparently, this PCI card sometimes breaks the PCI bus protocol rules when running heavy-hitter OpenGL applications, causing the machine to halt. Once you're sure you have the right destination drive selected, click the Install button.After I installed a Creative Labs' Creative GeForce2 MX PCI card into my system, I had what I assumed was an intermittent PCI bus bug for about a year. This will ERASE all information on this drive, so choose carefully-and then double-check (and triple-check) your choice! Choose your USB target device-the drive you want to make into a Windows boot drive. In the WoeUSB-ng application window, find the Windows.iso file and select it. You can also launch the program for an easy-to-use interface. To create a boot disk from the command line, the syntax requires the command, a path to your Windows ISO file ( /dev/sdX in this example use the lsblk command to determine your drive), and a device: $ sudo woeusb -device Windows.iso /dev /sdX You can use WoeUSB-ng from the command line or the GUI version. I'm running Pop!_OS, which is an Ubuntu derivative, but being comfortable with Python, I chose the pip3 install: $ sudo pip3 install WoeUSB-ng Create a boot disk There's no functional difference between these methods, so use whichever's familiar to you. This is universal across any Linux distribution. Alternatively, you can use Python's package manager, pip, to install the application. If you're on a supported Linux operating system, you can install WoeUSB-ng using your package manager. The GitHub repository contains instructions for installing WoeUSB-ng on Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, or with pip3.
The open source software has two programs: a command-line utility and a graphical user interface (GUI) version.
That is until I discovered WoeUSB-ng, a GPL 3.0 Linux tool that creates a bootable USB drive for Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10. Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.