What's wrong with my boot.ini?

spearson

spearson

Member
Code: 
[boot loader] 
timeout=30 
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS 
[operating systems] 
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
I have 2 drives, but they're set up in a RAID. What am I doing wrong? The error message I'm getting is "INVALID BOOT.INI FILE. Attempting to boot from C:\windows..."

Thanks,
Sam
 
Thanks for the welcome :smile:

I tried using EasyBCD 2.0 to reconfigure the boot.ini, but it didn't work. No changes were made: neither did it change boot.ini if it was already there, nor did it create it if it wasn't.

I tried restarting again after recreating boot.ini manually and it seemed to work! I got NTDETECT failed error, though.

I google'd the error and it seems I have to repair my Startup Environment through the XP recovery console. After loading the console, however, it asks me to log on to either D:\WINDOWS or E:\WINDOWS. This is strange, since Windows 7 is on C:\ and XP is on D:\. I tried logging in to D:\ with both my XP password and my 7 password; neither worked. I have not yet tried logging on to E:\, but if anyone has any advice--perhaps similar situation happened before--please let me know. thanks!
 
Please go to Useful Utilities -> Power Console

Type in
Code: 
BootGrabber.exe /list
and paste the output here.
 
BootGrabber utility.
Copyright NeoSmart Technologies 2009 <http://neosmart.net/>

D,0,4259300
P,1,,7,104853504,75386880,Yes
P,2,C:\,7,85781901312,40687370240,Yes
P,3,D:\,7,43018207232,8676954112,Yes
P,4,E:\,7,371198660608,6006521856,Yes

This leads me to believe that Windows 7 created a hidden boot partition. I changed the boot.ini to be partition(3) and am still getting NTDETECT failed.
 
Yep. The boot.ini that EasyBCD modified is on the hidden partition, that's why you didn't see the changes on the boot.ini you were looking on.

All you need to do now is copy NTLDR and NTDETECT to that hidden partition. You'll need to assign that partition a letter to do so.

Letters can me assigned from "Computer Management" in the control panel from the "Disk Management" section.
 
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