W2k boots straight to a crash

My W2k box has died. Every time I boot, no matter whether I try safe mode, last good config, or debug mode, it will get thru most of the boot phase and then die.

It boots thru the black screen, then as it loads the W2K 'loading' screen the blue bar pauses at maybe 75% done, then I see the console for maybe 2 seconds, it says on it "autocheck- AUTOCHK not found" then I hear drives click off and it goes to the blue error screen. All the error screen says is to remove any new hardware or software, the try to boot again.

SO, the box is unusable. Thank God I had a dual boot to 98SE on the same box or I wouldn't be writing this...I have not yet tried to do a Repair, as I don't have the 4 floppies I need for that. In the meantime- any ideas what could have caused this? Before it died, I was setting up permissions on my networked drives....could setting permissions really wrong cause this?

do you have an active account other then your admin if so see if you can boot into it, see if you can log into admin from that account, also do you have an erd, which is only one disk, and do you have the w2k cd which will allow you to boot into your recovery console. BUT FIRST, pull you nic and boot up, see what you get. also were you messing with any of your services?

sorry I took so long to reply-

well, I didn't make an ERD cuz I'm dumb. It won't boot far enough in for me to login.

When booted normally It crashes by immediatley going to the Console screen for maybe 3 seconds, displaying the words: "autochk program not found-AUTOCHECK", then going to the blue STOP screen

The STOP screen tells me: " The Session Manager Initialization process terminated unexpectedly. The system has been shut down" then some more crap about how I should remove any new hardware, which I don't have.

I managed to boot it too the recovery console w/ the 4 disk combo, but that doesn't help. I found a very recent .REG backuop I made, but the console doesn't seem to have any command to merge it.

I can't think of any other option besides a format...darn it.