Ok I've had my gaming rig build for about 2yrs now. I'm decently knowledgeable about things but I'm not tech by any means well to the point....Yesterday while in a game I got a error i've never had before syshost.sys crashed and my box just restarted. Booted back up fine and was working like it always has so i just blew it off. Well today i'm sitting here not even at the PC and I hear it reboot from the other room so i come in to see whats up and its in a chain reboot mode. Only thing i could do was hit the power button to stop it. I never install anything on this box other then driver updates from the companys. other then that I put a gig of ram in it 3 days ago, so i took that out and left my original 512 stick in. started the machine back up seems to be bootin up fine then it tells me "Invalid boot.ini," "booting from c:\WINNT" and it continues to start up just fine and run like it always has, and was no longer chain rebooting. So at first thought maybe it was overheating and that was causing the chain reboot. checked all my fans they were all runing good and strong 5 case fan's + CPU Fan. Temp was in the normal area. So I shut it down, put the gig stick back in along with the 512 stick. booted up, invalid boot.ini but continues to boot and did not go into the chain rebooting. So I went thru to make sure i had no spyware/virus's or the such nothing found mulitple different programs ran to check for both of these came back clean. Machine seems to be runing just fine and how it always has in the past. However i am still getting the invalid boot.ini when i reboot/start up etc. I went thru and replaced the boot.ini with a fresh new copy with all the correct info in it and replaced the old one. Rebooted same problem still....So I realized i forgot to set the changed one to "Read only" so i went back and did that again only to notice the 1st copy i replaced had changed in size from 192bytes to 242bytes but contained the same info. So I replaced it again with the Read only boot.ini rebooted same problem still....So after some searching around the web and coming back with a few people that have experienced teh same problems I tried their suggestions of booting from my 2k disk and runing the repair option and runing "Fixboot" it replaced and said it generated a new boot sector for me, but i'm still getting the invalid boot.ini. I'm kinda runing outta ideas here and have asked many RL friends about this and they are about as clueless as I am with out doing a total fresh install. I only have 1 partition and 1 OS on this box and it doesn't seem to be affecting anything other then just an error that bugs the crap outta me cause well no one likes errors. So if anyone has any insight into this or idea's please lemme know.

WITH DUE REGARDS TO JIM,I M ATTACHING HIS POST HERE,SINCE HE HAD A SIMILAR PROB LIKE YOURS,KINDLY GO THRU N LET ME KNOW Name: Jim Date: April 15, 2002 at 11:24:59 Pacific Subject: invalid boot.ini loading from c:\windows Reply: Here's how I fixed the invalid boot.ini problem (Windows XP Pro). The reason this occurs, I suspect, is that the original boot.ini file gets corrupted somehow. In my case, I had a system lockup. When it rebooted, I started getting the invalid boot.ini message. I tried a couple of things at first. Tried a system restore, but it did nothing. I then cleared out the boot.ini file and saved it, then re-opened it and put back in the information (i checked the boot.ini file information and it matched perfectly with what should be there). This also did nothing, which lead me to believe the original boot.ini file waa simply corrupted. To fix this - and its a pathetically simple fix after having done all of this, go to run and type in MSCONFIG. Then click on the "Boot.ini" tab. First, make sure if using XP Pro that the following is listed: [boot loader] timeout=30 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 - this is the boot.ini information from XP, straight from the Microsoft Web Site. All the information below [operating systems] should be on one line! If you have a blank boot.ini file, copy and paste this information - if all information is already there, then don't change anything. Next, click the button that says "check all boot paths". You should get back a message stating that everything is good (the computer checks to make sure the boot.ini file is compatible with Microsoft Operating Systems). Next, assuming your computer likes the boot.ini file that is in there (and it should), then click the button that says "set as default". By doing this, you have now created a new (modified) boot.ini file that is a carbon copy of the original. Click apply. You will be prompted to restart. Before doing so, go back to MSCONFIG and in the general tab you will see that "use modified boot.ini" should now be checked. During reboot, you should not get the invalid boot.ini message (at least I didn't). What you will get is a message (after reachign the desktop) stating that you are not using the defaults or something like that and do you wish to go back into MSCONFIG to restore the default settings. Since your new boot.ini file is exactly the same as your original, click no and check the box to hide that irritating message. Hope this helps someone with the same problem I had. Jim

Here's mine for a boot to WINNT on C, so should work for you. [Boot Loader] Timeout=5 Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT [Operating Systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect The "multi.../fastdetect" is on one line of course. One suggestion - make sure when you copy into Notepad that you hit ENTER at the end of the last line so there's a CR/LF at the end of the line - I think it matters. Also ensure that there's a space between the last " and /fastdetect on that line, as I'm sure that matters.