Can't copy boot.ini file

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ralph Hutchinson
  • Start date Start date
R

Ralph Hutchinson

I have a dual boot system on a single hard disc with two primary drives C:
and D:. I have WinME installed on the C: drive and WinXPPro on the D:
drive. The ME system on the C: drive has crashed. I have an exact copy of
that entire system along with it's installed programs on another hard drive.
I now want to reformat the new but crashed C: drive and recopy that system
from the old drive again to the new drive.

I'm assuming that the boot.ini files for both the ME and XP systems on the
new disc are written to the boot sector on the C: drive. I want to copy the
boot.ini files to a floppy to make a "start up" or "rescue" disk but the
system will not allow that. I've tried to boot with a rescue disk from
another computer and use DOS to change the attributes on the file so I could
copy it but it still won't let me access the file at all. Can anyone tell
me how to accomplish this? Or perhaps it's not possible? Any other advice?

Thanks in advance for any words of wisdom.
 
Hi,

Where are you trying to copy boot.ini from and what is the exact error
message you are receiving?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
Rick, I'm trying to copy it from the root of the C: drive. It will not copy
the file and when I started the machine in dos and used the >attrib -h
*.ini< command it said it will not reset the attribute on the system files.
I am assuming Windows is not letting that happen but I didn't think when I
booted to dos that windows had any affect on the files?

Ralph
 
Could you create a new boot.ini file by going to MSCONFIG and copying the
information from the Boot.ini tab, and then setting the appropriate file
attributes?
 
SeaMaid,

Well, SeaMaid, we solved the problem. Finally got fed up with all the
"technical" crap and just did a new install of ME over the top of the old
system using the original ME installation disc. We were afraid that would
overwrite the boot.ini file and prevent the XP menu from showing up, but it
didn't. ME apparently found that file and set itself up as the default
system and now everything is working fine again. We're changing the ini
file now to make XP the default system and life is good again.

Thanks a ton for all the attempted help. Ya'all here are great!

Frank
 
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