You receive the "OS Loader V3.5 Windows NT Could Not Start" error message (122793)

SYMPTOMS

When you have more than 3,000 shares on Windows NT version 3.1, the following message may appear when you upgrade to Windows NT version 3.5 and reboot your computer:

OS Loader V3.5 ....

Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \<WinRoot>\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows NT Setup using the original Setup floppy disk or CD-ROM. Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair. The following has been reported concerning NT 3.51 and 4.0 via comment:

A customer called and on a machine with 250+ megs of RAM and 3800 shares they are unable to copy Win95 profiles properly to the server. There are no errors and no events being logged on the server.

CAUSE

Due to several technical issues, OS Loader V3.5 (NTLDR) only has access to about 16 megabytes (MB) of RAM at boot time. It must load the SYSTEM configuration file within this range. If that file exceeds the 16 MB limit, the above error message appears.

The SYSTEM file which among other things contains share information, achieved this size due to a problem in the Windows NT 3.5 kernel (NTOSKRNL.EXE, NTKRNLMP.EXE) code which caused excessive fragmentation of this file with this number of shares.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 3.5. This problem was corrected in the latest U.S. Service Pack for Windows NT version 3.5. For information on obtaining the Service Pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

S E R V P A C K

A fix was made to the kernel code which corrects the fragmentation problem and thus the SYSTEM file growth. Development is investigating moving the share information from the SYSTEM hive to the SOFTWARE hive. Share information is not needed at boot time and the SOFTWARE hive is not restricted to a 16 MB limit.