Boot.ini problem under Win98...

[fatoyjapa]

I was formatting a system for a business associate of mine who disliked Windows ME and wanted an upgrade to either XP Pro or dowgrade to 98se (don't ask me why) as well as the format.

I formatted the usual way, installed Windows, everything worked fine. I then attempted to uprgrade to Xp without sucess, they told me this wasn't important so I removed the 'Windows XP Professional' startup from the boot.ini leaving what I thought to be the primary partition boot of Win 98se. However, in my infinite stupidity, I managed to erase the wrong entry so that the botched xp setup is the only choice in the os choices menu. I tried booting from a Windows 98se startup disk to restore the backup I made of boot.ini but the system will not get past the OS choices menu, in which the only choice is a botched install of XP :-(

Would copying a working boot.ini onto a floppy solve this problem? If so then I would appreciate it a great deal if someone could post details for me.

APologies if this is an incredibly naive question with an unbelievably simple anwser.

Many thanks in advance.

Fatoy Japa.

 

[wolluf]

'I then attempted to uprgrade to Xp without sucess' - how much 'not success'? Ie, is the windows 98 installation still intact (if you were upgrading, XP would have been overwriting 98 - only if setting up a dual boot - ie, clean install with 98 left on, would it leave 98 on and create a boot entry for it in boot.ini).

If 98 is still there (and XP created a dual boot - which means file bootsect.dos must also exist in the root of C:, then:-

1. A boot.ini looking like this should boot 98

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=C:[operating systems]
C:\="Microsoft Windows"

2. You can restore 98's boot sector by booting from a win98 boot floppy and typing sys C: at the commmand prompt. If it boots to a command prompt rather than win98 after this, you may needto restore the msdos.sys file (see

http://members.aol.com/axcel216/msdos.htm

for help and examples you can use).

As this is all just installed, I presume there's no data/apps which matter - so best approach might be just a new clean install of 98.

 

[fatoyjapa]

'Without Success' = The install aborted before anything was replaced, an error which seems to be caused by a hardware conflict which I haven't the time to resolve.

Windows 98 worked perfectly fine after the XP install failed, however, there was an irritating OS choice menu item for the XP setup.

In short, 98 was running perfectly until I foolishly messed aroun with the boot.ini to remove that irritating prompt.


'You can restore 98's boot sector by booting from a win98 boot floppy ' - I should have specified that with this newfound error, the system will not boot from floppy or cd either. I know that replacing the boot.ini would be the perfect solution but I simply cannot get at it to do so. Is there a way in which the boot.ini could be read from a floppy before the OS choices menu has chance to kick in? Short of installing the hd as a slave in another system, i'm fresh out of ideas.

Thank you so much for your help and any further advice you might have.

 

[wolluf]

Bit confused - system can't boot from a floppy or CD (why not - assuming bios is set correctly). If this is true, then you've no way in (how can system read boot.ini from a floppy if it can't boot from one?) - you'll have to slave it to another machine.

However, unless PC (floppy drive?) is damaged, it will boot from a floppy if bios is set correctly. You can make an XP boot floppy, which may boot your win98 (it would boot XP with right boot.ini, but I've never tried it with a win9x menu entry). Just copy ntldr & ntdetect.com (from \i386 on the XP install CD) and boot.ini (looking like my earlier example) to a newly formatted floppy. Then try booting your machine with it.

 

[fatoyjapa]

Quick update, thanks very much for your help wolluf... In the end I just bit the bullet and slaved it to my desktop system and it's working fine now i've replaced the boot.ini with the one you specified.

Cheers again.