lost hard drive and boot.ini

N

natorgway

Member
I have been going round in circles trying not to have to re format my hard drive and lose all my data. Story so far.
Uninstalled loads of unwanted software. off my C drive (primary) win xp home. Wouldnt boot. Further meddling by me I eventually couldnt boot into safe mode. Ok long story shorter... I have now lost the boot.ini which was set up for a DUAL BOOT.......D Drive XP pro and the C drive letter. Tried this EasyBCD thing but that only seems to be able to rebuild my boot.ini if it can detect the other hard drive C. Cant enter recovery console it gives me an error message about protecting my computer or something.Trying to create a new boot ini manually but even though I have the exact settings and wording of the original boot ini , where do I save it to. I am told enter it into notepad and save to boot ini but I dont have one. Is it reliant on me getting the C drive back as it cant be seen in "my computer". There may be things obvious to you all as experts but i am not, only a self taught OAP.
Edward
 
Hi Edward, welcome to NeoSmart.

The first thing you need to do is get the C: drive visible again.
Please give us a screenshot of Control Panel | Admin Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management
 
Sorry dont have anything to record snapshot....Disk management shows only what I have already decribed. Only the D drive XP pro basic 24gb partition (was secondary drive) Ntfs 25% free
Healthy boot no overhead no fault tolerance. The C drive which disappearred was XP home 80gb 25 % free basic etc
Edward

Addendum:

Hey you will think I am telling stories or am a total moron , but i am not. You will nver guess but the C drive has just suddenly re appearred. I oonly trawled through the dveice mnagaer and the admin console etc looking for what you told me and after about 10 mins it re appearred when I clicked on start and explore. There it was back again.
So I have run BCD and got back the boot.ini too. Have you a magic wand or did you get my C drive back by thought transference. Can you explain its disappearance and re appearance without me doing anything??? Now all I have to do is to try to get the C drive to boot up and recover the files which is what I was doing when I messed it all up. As you can guess I dont really know what I am doing . Its all trial and error Edward
 
Last edited:
The controls to amke the C: visible are from the Disk Management section you entered. It's very possible that going there made the C: re-appear.

:smile:
 
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