LewB

XP Boot.ini File

My XP loaded Dell Dimension PC failed to boot up last night. It said that there was no boot.ini file and that the hal.dll file was corrupted.
Long story short, I spent 2 hours working on it. I finally got a boot.ini file on the beast that would bring it back to life. My question is: How the hell does a file like this just disappear ? I did an orderly shutdown of the machine the night before with no apparant problems.

Lew
My DVDs

imported_Andrew Pratt

Run a scandisk on that hard drive and see if there's any bad sectors.

LewB

I did that using the DOS prompt that you get when you boot the recovery CD. It said it did fix some stuff, but the file was still history.

Lew
My DVDs

imported_Andrew Pratt

There's a chance that XP tried to write that ini file to a bad sector then which means it didn't get written properly explaining why it failed to find it when it booted again.