Monday, November 22, 2010

How do I edit Boot.ini properly?

I installed Windows a non-traditional way, I will explain:

My notebook has no CD/DVD functionality, I had to use a floppy to boot into MS-DOS (the only floppy i had kept failing to write over and over so I had to repair it with flobo about 9 times) So once I finally booted success with A:\ I did fdisk, now my hard drive has two partitions one is 2.5GB and the other is 25GB roughly.



I made partition 1 (2.5GB) active and format it as C: with system files for emergencies (I do not want to use a floppy again, I would rather boot dos from partition 1) then I reboot and removed the floppy.



C: drive booted into DOS from here I had already pre-loaded the WindowsXP files off of my CD onto partition 2 from another machine at an earlier time.



So I ran smartdrv.exe then changed directory to the winxp folder and went into i386 proceeding to run winnt, installing Windows XP to partition 2 (25GB) so I have DOS on partition 1, XP on partition 2. If XP fails I would like DOS to still be bootable, the Boot.ini is on partition 1 (2.5GB)

here is what i did, but this crashes and reboots when I select the DOS option.

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partiti?br>
[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\=';?/noexecute=optin /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WI?Windows XP Professional'; /noexecute=optin /fastdetect



This is not working, any ideas? I assume \=DOS means the root of C:\ is where the boot files are, is this incorrect? Thanks!How do I edit Boot.ini properly?
W/o full lines it is tough to tell. This KB from Microsoft will give you a good idea of what it is about



http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

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