Here`s what you get by biting off more than you can chew. I have two hard drives, one has three partitions Ubuntu, Xp Pro and Xp pro. The second was for Vista, ha ha! The Vista installation failed due to an error towards the finish so I deleted it`s partition intending to try another time. On returning to my current Xp I was told that the boot.ini was missing, ok,I put the windows disc in, intending to rebuild the boot.ini, no joy, I tried several times,checking and rechecking I had things right,but it changed nothing. I can only think that the windows boot menu installed itself on the first Xp partition and messed it up. Any suggestions apart from reinstallation ? Mike T

"I can only think that the windows boot menu installed itself on the first Xp partition and messed it up." The above is by design - on any multiboot configuration that involves multiple partitions or HDDs, the Master Boot Record resides on the prevailing system partition. I'm sorry, you had to learn this the hard way. You can try FIXBOOT & FIXMBR from XP's recovery console to fix XP. In the future, if you want something different you can try BootIt NG from TeraByte Unlimited