Augh!! Boot ini (i guess) help please!

Hey all...

So I had 1 hard drive set up like so:
c: FAT32 win98
D: NTFS winXP pro

Reloading 98 today...

I did a search for boot.ini on C: so I could back it up in case i lost my boot menu. Well, nothing turned up on C:, so I formatted C:, figuring (like a dumba$$) that the boot.ini was on the ntfs partition and referenced to on the mbr or something--who knows what the hell I was thinking? Anyway, now I need to get my dual boot back!

SO... I would appreciate any advice on this. Do I need to make a boot.ini from scratch or can I recover it from the XP partition?

Try using the recover mode with the XP installer. Anybody else?

Take a look at this article. It is pretty close to what you will need to do. <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=%2fsearch%2fviewDoc.aspx%3fdocID %3dKC.Q249000%26dialogID%3d6009270%26iterationID%3 d1%26sessionID%3danonymous%7c4216890" target="_blank">Windows Advanced Options Boot Menu Missing at Startup (Q249000)</a>

Also this article, it tells you how to make a boot.ini from scratch. <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=%2fsearch%2fviewDoc.aspx%3fdocID %3dKC.Q311073%26dialogID%3d6009270%26iterationID%3 d1%26sessionID%3danonymous%7c4216890" target="_blank">Creating a Boot Disk for an NTFS or FAT Partition (Q311073)</a>

Just the boot.ini file will not be enough, you need a ntldr and Ntdetect.com .

Familiarize yourself with all of these articles, and you should be able to lick it. Also, the XP repair should be capable of working things out, however it may not offer 98 in the boot.ini. Therefore you will need to manually edit it.

One more article: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q136547" target="_blank">Restoring Windows NT Dual Boot After Installing Windows 95 (Q136547)</a> I know it refers to older OS's, however it suggests what Gollo said, running the repair might just fix things up, and could be the easiest way to do things...

Thanks for your responses, dudes.

I ended up running the install/repair off the CD.

Originally, I tried rolling with the text-based repair console, but the "bootcfg /add" command wasn't seeing my 98 partition.
Oh well, so I did hit the intsall option, then chose Repair when it identified the NTFS XP install. Which worked, so yay team!

Keep on Tech-in'