Windows 2000 Boot Failed - Error code 3

[Idontwantspam]

We've got some old computers at my school in one of the classrooms that have windows 2000 on them. They're not very good machines - max 40 gig hardrive, maybe 256 megs ram, intel pentinum III's or 4's, GMA video cards. They have the standard image for our school on them with Novell ( ), office, ZENworks and some other stuff. They do some weird boot sequence where they boot into SuSE linux, get an IP address through DHCP, does some stuff that is hidden by a splash screen, then restarts and boots into windows 2000. Occasionally, with no user "intervention" they'll get most of the way through the text-based boot screen:

WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL

PRESS F8 FOR ADVANCED BOOT OPTIONS

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Then it gives some error that I don't remember 'cause i didn't write it down, but basically it said windows couldn't start because of a boot error, contact your system administrator with error 3. If I don't figure something out, an IT guy will come and reimage the machine, but they sometimes take the machine away for weeks when they do this sort of thing. I'm going to try to recover the data on the disk with a bartpe disk, but it would be nice if I could fix the problem itself, and not have the machine be gone for long. And, I'd like to be able to prevent this from happening in the future if there's some way. It might be related to some sort of self-update that the computer does when in suse mode, since whenever they try to remotely change all the computers at once, something like this often happens, but this has occurred only to this computer and a couple of others, and not at the same time. Does anyone have any ideas?

[cluberti]

Is there anything in the system event log that would correlate to this error?

[Idontwantspam]

Unfortunately, I can't really look at the event logs if windows won't boot.

I won't be able to actually sit down in front of the machine for a while, maybe friday I'll get a chance. I've googled a bit, and it sounds like it could be a variety of problems. One mentioned is something about NTLDR. So I'm thinking I could copy a fresh NTLDR file(s?) off of an install disk, put them on a flash drive, boot to BartPE and copy over the new ones. It also sounds like it could be a hard-drive issue, but I can browse the hard-drive just fine from BartPE, so I don't think it's that. Is there a way to view event logs from BartPE?