Windows Me / XP Dual Boot Problem

[Mike]

I have a Dell Dimension 4100, P III - 733MHz, 512MB RAM, 2 Hard Drives
PC originally came with Me and was installed on C:\, I bought a copy of XP
Home
and installed it to the E:\ Drive. I was presented with a boot menu
allowing me to
choose which operating system I wanted to start up. Put my kids stuff on
C:\ and
mine on E:\

Everything was great until C:\ crashed and running Scandisk rendered
anything left
into useless garbage. I have reinstalled Me on the C:\ Drive and I have a
copy of
the Boot.ini file, but apparently there is something more that I need, since
I still
cannot get into the XP system.

I now have an operational Me system and an operational XP system I cannot
get
access to. Is there anyway to replace the missing information to gain
access back
to my XP system, besides reinstalling?

Thanks in Advance,
Mike

 

[John]

I have a Dell Dimension 4100, P III - 733MHz, 512MB RAM, 2 Hard Drives
PC originally came with Me and was installed on C:\, I bought a copy of XP
Home
and installed it to the E:\ Drive. I was presented with a boot menu
allowing me to
choose which operating system I wanted to start up. Put my kids stuff on
C:\ and
mine on E:\

Everything was great until C:\ crashed and running Scandisk rendered
anything left
into useless garbage. I have reinstalled Me on the C:\ Drive and I have a
copy of
the Boot.ini file, but apparently there is something more that I need, since
I still
cannot get into the XP system.

I now have an operational Me system and an operational XP system I cannot
get
access to. Is there anyway to replace the missing information to gain
access back
to my XP system, besides reinstalling?

Thanks in Advance,
Mike

Besides boot.ini you also need the other two boot strap files called
'ntldr' and 'ntdetect.com' to be on the active partition at boot time.
In your case they should be on C: drive. Even though you installed XP to
E:, C: was the active partition that bios looks to boot from so XP's
boot strap files needed to be placed on C: for XP to boot.

See here under the Windows XP section how to repair it.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

You may also need to issue a 'fixmbr' command from the repair console
while you are performing the above fix. This replaces the Master Boot
Record with an XP version that is slightly but importantly different
than the ME/Win98 version.

See here for fixmbr ...

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

John