One day my laptop wouldn't boot so I tried to repair an XP MCE setup with an XP Pro disc I had laying around. I encountered glitches. I set up the XP Pro on another partition and started working from that second partition OS to unravel what I had done on the first partition. It never worked. But my secondary installation was working fine. So I decided to delete the boot ini file and proceeded to wipe the first partition with Norton partition magic. It gave me the good advice to set my other partition to active, which I did, but when I went to reboot, no joy. ntldr missing. press ctrl alt del and reboot. Read another post from 2005 in this forum where the final poster suggests copying from my cd, in my case f:/i386/ntldr c:/ and then again f:/i386/ntdetect.com c:/ from the recovery console, however that didn't work. Boot config /rebuild or add doesn't work. Chkdsk finds an error on the disc, but I don't know what to do about it. It seems a lot of others have had the problem and even a clean install doesn't help. So, any ideas?

When you trashed the boot.ini you disabled the boot for all installed O/s. Regardles of where you install XP all the boot files still go on C: drive. You may be able to do a system repair from the xp cd you used.

Actually, my post is misleading. I didn't delete the entire boot.ini., only the one which seemed to point to the OS I was deleting, in this case, the one on the first partition. Partitions c, d and e still exist and only partition e has an OS on it, perhaps this f:/i386/ntldr c:/ and then again f:/i386/ntdetect.com c:/ pointing to e instead of c will work? I'll give it a shot.