Need to restore boot.ini on XP Home Edition

Question

While transferring data from another computer to my Inspiron B-130 with XP Home Edition, I accidently wrote over the boot.ini file with a boot.ini file for Windows Professional. The computer will not boot now and gives the message:    'Windows could not start because of a hard disk confuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware'   I ran the hard drive diagnostics on the hard drive and it passed every test. Also did chckdsk /r.   Doing a search here on 'Windows could not start' I found a Microsoft article on restoring boot.ini using bootcfg. The problem is that  XP Home Edition does not have the bootcfg program--I found that out by following a link to editing the boot.ini file which states plainly that XP Home Edition doesn't have bootcfg. My inspection shows that it is not on the XP Home Edition restore disk and not in \System 32 or \i386.   I also tried the ' expand cd-rom:\i386
toskrnl.ex_ drive:\Windows\system32' which does not solve the problem.   1. How can I generate a boot.ini file in the c:\ root or create a new one?    2. What should be in the new one?    3. Can I type it in at the DOS prompt?   4. What other critical files might have been written over?   Help appreciated.

Mary G · Answer

It's chkdsk  /r --hope that was just a typo. You do have bootcfg but it is only accessible by using the Recovery Console when you boot to the windows xp cd. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314058&Product=winxp

diverse · Answer

Thanks. That was a typo in chkdsk.

On my Windows recovery cd for XP Home Edition there is no bootcfg. I looked for it when I first tried the recovery as detailed on this page.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477?c=us&l=en&cs=19&s=dhs

I searched and searched and couldn't find it. Thought I was going nuts. Then I looked on this page and found the text that follows. Its about half way down the page

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022/EN-US/

=============== begin snip ==================

Modifying the Boot.ini

While you can modify the Boot.ini file using the Startup and Recovery dialog, where you can select the default operating system, change the timeout value, or manually edit the file, the following method uses the command line utility, Bootcfg.exe.

Note The Bootcfg.exe utility is only available in Windows XP Professional. This utility is not available in Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. Therefore, this section does not apply to Windows XP Home Edition

=================== end snip =======================

Heeeelllppp. Still need a way to recover boot.ini

diverse · Answer

Here is the solution, for the record, and since it might help someone in the future. The answer that I came up with was to use the Recovery disk to go to the root of c: and I deleted the bad file boot.ini. Then I ran chkdsk /r which created a new boot.ini.

Windows General

Need to restore boot.ini on XP Home Edition

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