I made a typo in boot.ini, no startup now

[Ken]

Since using boot floppies to fix a Windows problem last
week, I've been getting the choice of which OS to boot to,
Windows or Windows 2000. I looked in the knowledge database
to find out how to delete the Windows line in boot.ini to
remove the extra OS (which is not present). I made a backup
of the original boot.ini file in its own temp folder, and
changed the one in the root directory. But I made a
grievous error in the typing, now at powerup, Windows won't
start. Even when trying to boot up from floppies and the
ERD disk, I get the message that ntoskrnl.exe is missing.
Windows cannot be found. Any suggestions for what to do
next will be most welcome. Thanks.

 

[Ricardo M. Urbano - W2K/NT4 MVP]

Since using boot floppies to fix a Windows problem last
week, I've been getting the choice of which OS to boot to,
Windows or Windows 2000. I looked in the knowledge database
to find out how to delete the Windows line in boot.ini to
remove the extra OS (which is not present). I made a backup
of the original boot.ini file in its own temp folder, and
changed the one in the root directory. But I made a
grievous error in the typing, now at powerup, Windows won't
start. Even when trying to boot up from floppies and the
ERD disk, I get the message that ntoskrnl.exe is missing.
Windows cannot be found. Any suggestions for what to do
next will be most welcome. Thanks.

Did you make an ERD before mucking w/ the boot.ini file? Do you have a
Windows 2000 CD so that you can boot to the Recovery Console?

 

[Guest]

Did you make an ERD before mucking w/ the boot.ini file?
Do you have a

Windows 2000 CD so that you can boot to the Recovery Console?

Afraid not. However, I did make one on our other Win2K
computer. It didn't seem to have any effect. Is there a way
without being in a Windows environment that I can access
the C: root directory to copy the backup of the original
boot.ini file and replace the damaged one with it?

 

[Madhur Ahuja]

Afraid not. However, I did make one on our other Win2K
computer. It didn't seem to have any effect. Is there a way
without being in a Windows environment that I can access
the C: root directory to copy the backup of the original
boot.ini file and replace the damaged one with it?

Hello

IF you have a fat32 drive, you can boot
through a bootable floppy created through
win98.

Hope it helps

--
Winners dont do different things, they do things differently.

Madhur Ahuja
India

Homepage : http://madhur.netfirms.com
Email : madhur<underscore>ahuja<at>yahoo<dot>com

 

[William W. Plummer]

Hello

IF you have a fat32 drive, you can boot
through a bootable floppy created through
win98.

Hope it helps

--
Winners dont do different things, they do things differently.

Madhur Ahuja
India

Homepage : http://madhur.netfirms.com
Email : madhur<underscore>ahuja<at>yahoo<dot>com

Format a floppy on a friend's Win2K machine. It must be on Win2K,
nothing else. Copy his ntdetect.com, ntldr and his boot.ini to the
floppy. Edit the boot.ini if need be. Boot your machine with the
floppy in A: . It should come up.

Connect to C: . Get into a CMD box. Do attrib -r -h -s boot.ini .
Copy the boot.ini from the floppy. Then, attrib +r +h +s boot.ini .
Remove the floppy and boot normally.

All boot.ini does is say where the operating system (ntorkrnl.exe) is
from physical numbers like controller, drive, partition and directory
name. It doesn't matter where boot.ini lives, but you should always
have a copy of the floppy you made for just this reason.

 

[Ken]

Format a floppy on a friend's Win2K machine. It must be on Win2K,
nothing else. Copy his ntdetect.com, ntldr and his boot.ini to the
floppy. Edit the boot.ini if need be. Boot your machine with the
floppy in A: . It should come up.

Thank you very much for this suggestion. I copied the three
files onto a floppy, put it in my ailing machine and it
started up without problem. Then I deleted the faulty
boot.ini file and replaced it with the original. I will
copy the boot.ini file from the floppy disk and replace the
original with it, and this should remove the screen at
startup asking which OS to load. I didn't see it during
startup from the floppy disk. Again, thank you for your help.

Ken