Hi, hope the heading wasn't too cryptic.

I moved from overseas, and thought it'd be best to bring just the hard drive, internal boards and motherboard of my old pc....unfortunately when I put it in a new case, all sorts of problems happened, it would just boot endlessly then reboot.

When the rest of our belongings arrived, I had my windows 2000 disk, and thought I could do a repair - no dice. So I reinstalled windows and at least got it kind of sort of working, with quite a few flashes of BSOD and all sorts of issues.....it was also running very very slowly, and now it's worse.

I'd added a few new things, including a Logitech wireless kb and mouse. I ran the original installer disk which seemed to put a lot of crud and adware on it, so, after experiencing some issues, I used GoBack (I have Nortons Systemworks premier 2006 on it, and had an older version before....I know a lot of people don't like it, but for me it seems ok, I don't know how much it slows it down, but the recovery feature's good anyway)

So I decided I'd try to clone the drive as it is, with Norton Ghost, and then reformat one drive and start again. Not only can I not get Ghost to run - the puter just goes straight to BSOD after a few minutes of just sitting - and it takes AGES to get full up to speed, I keep getting messages Zonealarm is starting ten minutes later or so!

So there's a lot of old stuff on it, much of which I don't really need, which is another reason to start over, and I'll hopefully be able to transfer my documents etc over, assuming I can get into the drive.

Tried running repair installation from the w2k disk, no dice, not even sure if I can reinstall the os from scratch - when I did the first time, it was so flaky....

Anyway, having decided to start again on another hard drive, I suddenly realised I need my old NT disk, to do the install, since my copy of win 2k is an upgrade, and I don't think I still have the NT disk, when I was packing to move, everyone was on at me to throw stuff out, and I suspect that was one thing....I'm kicking myself, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere.

It's not like I don't have licensed copies or anything, I just don't have the N disk anymore. I'd love to upgrade to Vista but the stuff I need to get to wouldn't run on it, and it's an older motherboard. 1.1 or 1.8 gig.

Am I toasted, or is there another way? I remember an old trick with upgrading Word, you didn't strictly need an old version on the machine, I had it but installing it made it crash, I don't know if there's such a workaround.

I've struggled with this thing for weeks, to no avail. Can't afford to pay anyone else to fix it, need to retrieve my files, looking for work so need a computer for applications, wife's doing her Masters so my ancient Powerbook's in high demand....any help appreciated!