XP Boot.ini File (1 Viewer)

[LewB]

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.

 

[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.

 

[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.