Problem with non-standard BOOT.INI

Hi all. Hope you guys don't mind me posting a question about a Win2K Boot.ini here. I'm trying to upgrade a Win2K installation to XP, so I hope that qualifies.

I'm trying to upgrade a customer's installation from Win2K to XPP. To be on the safe side, I cloned her hard drive to a spare drive, mounted the cloned unit into her case and it booted fine. So far, so good.

Then I inserted the XP disk and attempted to upgrade Win2K. But it stalled and said it couldn't copy C:\BOOT.INI. I took a look at the ini file and it was unreadable in Notepad, Wordpad or Word, (garbage characters) plus it's about 1mb in size, instead of the few bytes of a standard ini.

I took a look at the ini on the original drive (which was also booting fine) and it's the same - unreadable and 1mb.

So I changed the cloned drive's ini to a standard Win2K model, and restarted it, but it refused to boot.

Anyone have a clue as to what's going on here? Could this ini be some sort of proprietary file? Just had a look at the system with ERD Commander and it seems like it was originally an IBM system, and has a recovery partition. However, I can always dump that using ERD.

Advice would be appreciated,
Thanks

 

Don't know if you have it fixed yet, but try deleting boot.ini or make it blank.

 

Hi masonite,

What does the boot.ini file look like?

I have a dual boot system and it looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=15
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Professional(2)" /fastdetect

This write screen has word wrapped it. However, for W2K, the Windows portion would be: "\WINNT "

The reason I ask is because you said there was "garbage" in there and was 1mb in size. It should only be 1KB in size.

 

TopFarmer, that's an interesting suggestion, to delete the boot.ini file altogether. It didn't occur to me. However, I've given the PC back to the owner, so I can't try it now. One thing I did try was a regular Win2K boot.ini but that didn't work. It just wouldn't boot at all.

jpChris: LOL, there's no way I can tell you what the boot.ini looked like because it was just a collection of garbage characters, that took up many Notepad pages. Its properties described its size at about 1mb.

Something of a mystery really. As I said, I can only figure it was some sort of proprietary IBM file that was also tied up with the inbuilt recovery partition. I don't think it could have been virus-induced, as NOD32 and Malwarebytes antispyware gave it a clean bill of health.

And the machine does run, albeit somewhat slowly. Still, the processor is only a 766, so that mightn't be unusual.