I have a friends hd which has xp & is possibly infected with a virus. It can't access windows, It says the boot.ini file has been corrupted, insert windows xp cd & hit r for repair just before the boot screen. well I booted up with the cd, I hit R & have no clue about what to do. Any help. P.S. I also tried accessing the drive as a slave, but that didn't help, the drive appears in my comp but can't be accessed. I have ntfs &I believe the drive has fat 32

Hi booterror, hello everyone, booterror, Do not select R from the first screen. Instead select To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER. On the next screen select the Windows install you want to repair. Now press R. You will need your friends Product Key Code during the Repair. Best Regards and Wishes, Mesich, Webmaster of mesich.com Currently stored on a temporary webhost.

Morning Mesich. A little more detail. How to do a system repair.--Boot from the xp cd and go past the recovery console to the install menu. Select repair the existing installation. You won't lose any data except the xp updates. Unless you have a slipstream sp1 Or SP2 cd you will have to d/l sp1 or sp2 and all subsequent updates. You MUST have at least SP1 installed and the updates for security reasons. Be sure the firewall and A/V is active before going online as you will be susceptible to sasser and msblaster. http://computervitals.com/

Good Morning Per, It can be confusing for a lot of users, including myself, the way the menu's are setup when booting from the CD to repair an install. First screen; To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER. To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R. To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3. Very good point about the firewall and A/V. Best Regards and Wishes, Mesich, Webmaster of mesich.com Currently stored on a temporary webhost.

So first you were trying to boot the hard drive in your machine with totally different hardware and it didn't work? That might be because of you and not a virus. It might be better to just reinstall Windows on there. You may be able to get something kludged together, but no guarantees. It sounds like your friend is counting on you.

You need to put the drive back in the machine it came from in order to do the repair instal. Otherwise, if you succeed in "repairing" it while it is in your box, it will not boot up in it's native environment. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

I forgot to mention this after hitting R, I entered DOS mode. I had an option to type exit to reboot the system & help. Is this the usual recovery mode?