I have a dell laptop here that has a missing or damaged boot.ini file. I need to recover one file from this machine and than scrap the install or in a perfect world repair the install. I have no ERD. If i cant repair the install, I have a 3.5inch drive to 2.5 converter. If i set it as a master up on the secondary channel on a windows2000 desktop. Will i have access to the drive? Can anyone think of a method of recovering this file. It is located in My doc's in the administrator account so i know the location? -Cheers

Yep...if you set it up using your converter you will be able to get to your file from the W2K desktop....you can also format the drive once you have finished so that you can do a clean install of whatever OS you want. I would try booting from the W2K CD (assuming you have a CD rom drive??) first! You will have to set your system to boot from the cd drive in BIOS and then you can attempt to repair the installation...

First, Yes it will work on the desktop - I do it all the time. But have you thought of trying to recreate the boot.ini file? It is a standard text file and you can look at examples of other boot.ini files. If you were running one hard drive with one partition you can pretty much copy the file as is from another system with a similar setup. example: [boot loader] timeout=6 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 You also may have a backup on there called boot.bak.