boot.ini repair

[amaineiac]

When I boot up my system, I will sometime get a "unmountable_boot_volume" error message. After a few more boot attempts, the system boots up fine. After searching google, I found that my boot.ini file is probably messed up. The problem is that I seem to have misplaced my XP disk, and it seems I will need it to repair my boot.ini file.

My question is this, can I use another XP disk (my wife can get a copy from work) to repair my boot.ini file, or does it have to be the same disk that I used to install XP onto my drive?

Thanks.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Hello, and welcome to the Windows Forum!

I do not think that the message you are getting is caused by the boot.ini file being damaged. If it is damaged, then you cannot boot.

Anyway, a damaged boot.ini file is quite easy to repair manually. Can you post the contents of your boot.ini file (normally located on the root of the C: drive).

For some basic information on the boot.ini file see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314081/

[cozofdeath]

A quick way to check if your boot.ini is ok is to open msconfig (Start, Run, type msconfig) go to the boot.ini tab and click the "Check All Boot Paths" button. Although I agree with Pat that its probably not the problem.

[amaineiac]

Thanks for the advise guys. The reason I thought it might be the boot.ini file is because when I did a search on google, I found a few websites that gave the same advise as this one: http://www.5starsupport.com/xp-faq/1-7.htm

Anyway, I did as cozofdeath suggested and all the boot paths seem fine.

I didn't want my first post here to be long and drawn out, but since you've shot the boot.ini solution down, here are some more details.

I bought a new computer and installed my old computers main drive (with XP on it) as a backup drive. I did a clean install of XP onto the new computers HD. Everything seemed to be working fine till a week ago when the computer crashed while running photoshop elements. When it rebooted, a few blue screens came up....I think it ran checkdisk automatically and it booted up to my old drive. Even after verifying the bios settings were correct, I could not get it to boot to the new drive. I though for sure it just died. I unplugged the new drive and reseated all the connections to it. It booted correctly this time but ever since then, it will sometimes take 2 or 3 boot attempts to get it to fully boot up.

I haven't formatted the old drive yet, do you think that could causing the problem? Even though the bios is set to boot from the new drive?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

[-pops-]

So you have two copies of Windows XP on your single machine without any proper means of the computer knowing which to boot from?

I appreciate that it should boot from drive "C" as a norm but, duing bootup there are very many processes going on such that having a second O/S there without specific instructions which to use could be causing problems.

As an experiment, remove the old drive with the old Windows on it and see if the problem is cured.

[amaineiac]

I'm going to be out of town for a few days, but when I get back, I'm going to format the old drive and see if that takes care of the problem.

Thanks for the info guys, I really appreciate it.

[amaineiac]

Looks like you guys were right.

I formated the old drive yesterday and that didn't help. It actually made it worse. Instead of failing to boot 25% of the time, it would fail about 90% after the format.

I called around to a few computer shops to see what they would charge to look at it. I had the good fortune to speak with 1 guy that listened to what it was doing and suggested that the drive may be bad and causing a hardware conflict. After unplugging the drive, the boot issues are gone. I also stumbled upon my XP disk that I thought I lost.....so things are looking up.

Thanks for the help.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Great news!