Renaming and deleting boot.ini on NT networked drive

[Tangleman]

I've got a rather unique problem. I am replacing the OS on a networked Win NT4 drive (mainly to upgrade to SP6), and the interface requires it to be a very unique solution. I have to boot up the drive and map it using Win95, Win2K, and WinXP (must work on all of these OS's), verify that it needs the OS upgrade, and unzip it over the network to a folder named V7NT. Then I need to modify the existing boot.ini file to point to the new OS directory.

The problem is that I need to be able to recover from an error at almost any point in this upgrade (ethernet failure, etc). So my current steps are:

Unzip new OS (automatically performs checksums)
Clear attributes of current boot.ini file
rename boot.ini to boot_old.ini
copy new boot.ini file to drive
use crc to verify integrity of new boot.ini file
reboot networked computer

Occasionally, I get an error that I could not clear the attributes of the old boot.ini because the "File could not be found." Is this because it is hidden? Usually, when I get this error, the reboot reports that it could not load ntoskrnl. Is there a better, more reliable way to do all of this in VB6 talking to a WinNT machine?

This is an urgent issue, so I would appreciate any assistance as soon as possible.

Thank you