BSOD and BootSkin on 2K Pro

No, I'm not switching to XP OR Vista!

from Stardock Forums
I have this old Dell Optiplex I've been toying with. It's a P3-400 running Win2K Pro and I installed BootSkin because it's supposed to be able to run on 2000 Pro, but when I boot this mo-fo up, my chosen bootscreen flashes up for a split second then dies in a BSOD and nothing has been able to fix this. I've tried Safe Mode (with and without Networking), Last Known Good, VGA Mode... I've tried all the options on the F8 Menu and sometimes I get "Inaccesible Boot Device" but mostly I just get "STOP 0x000000D1: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (...) BOOTVID.DLL" - it just depends on the options I choose.

I have 2 other machines both running 2K Pro and I just burned the new version of Hiren's Boot CD. If I knew for sure what the problem was, I'd just copy what I needed to a floppy, boot from Hiren's using NTFS Pro and one of the File Managers to simply replace the affected (afflicted?) system files, but I need to know what was changed by BootSkin.

Any help would be simply marvelous because I'm not going to reinstall Windows and my wife uses this crappy old Dell for writing and email and if I don't get this fixed, I'm in deep ... well, I'll be on the couch for the foreseeable future.
bootskin
5,500 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Bootskin doesn't work on all BIOS. There are alternate versions available for download, but if none of them work then there's really nothing you can do.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I thought bootskin was just for XP  
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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
well if you can't boot up in safe mode, you will need to repair your win2k installation.
Get your original win2k install cdrom, boot your pc off this install cdrom, when the win2k install cdrom boots up, go through the prompts and look for the repair option. It will re-install the win2k core os files, if you can get win2k to bootup after this process, you will need to reinstall sp4 & the update rollup pkg and all subsequent updates. I don't see any other way around the win2k repair process.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Bootskin is not for Windows 2k   

Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Actually, that's not altogether true - I've been using Bootskin on my Dell Optiplex GX1 (P3/500) with 2KPro SP4 since shortly after Bootskin was released without a bit of trouble.

I have the A10 bios update (from about August of 2001), however, & believe I had updated to that bios before installing Bootskin. If by chance you've never updated the bios on your Dell, might be worth downloading the bios update file to a floppy on another computer (along with the bios updating instructions) and see if you can flash your bios. You may have to boot using the original installation disk to get into Windows or to Safe Mode (I think you can do that) before going to the trouble of reinstalling (repairing) Windows completely, since an incompatible bios is the more likely problem, rather than any of the Windows core files.

Good luck.
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
From Bootskin home page
Stardock BootSkin is a program that allows users to change their Windows 2000 and Windows XP boot screens.
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I've tried running the repair option from the CD ROM but it says there are no Win2K installations. The Dell is an Optiplex GX1 400L+ with BIOS Reviosion A02. I'll check into a flash for the BIOS and see what happens.

It's too bad there isn't some kind of list somewhere that lists which BIOS vendors/versions break the rules!

As for BootSkin not running on 2K Pro, well, I have it running fine on my main machine - an Intel Dual Core 3.3 GHz Hyperthreaded system on an Asrock board.

Thanks for the help so far!
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I stand corrected then...my bad.