I got that balky Win2K machine to boot up eventually yesterday. It turns out the
hard drive was willing to boot if I didn't let it try and run CHKDSK, but
letting it execute CHKDSK not only lead to a blue screen of death, but was
inevitably followed by a disk boot failure (weee!). There's nothing to explain
exactly what caused the hard drive to decide to eventually boot again, but I
skipped the CHKDSK and it booted okay (go fig). It's all working for the moment,
but none of this makes me feel that this wasn't a brush with danger (cue Bond
theme, and exit our hero into the sunset on a life raft with MrsBlue).