On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 18:56 +0530, BombayNews wrote:

How does one change the boot.ini on a computer? The problem is this: The

You don't need to alter boot.ini.

the machine works okay GRUB, Ubuntu and all. According to the engineer this is a usual problem with XP. He has advised editing boot.ini to make Linux the default OS but he warned that it can be done only once. Also that if Linux is made default Windows XP cannot be opened, etc.

Hogwash, with boot.ini you can boot WinXP as well as Linux but why bother with boot.ini.

So how does one configure boot.ini so that the computer begins working even with the XP files corrupted, etc. The person who owns the computer

If WinXP files are corrupted esp. ntloader or boot.ini then you are hosed.

The easiest solution - Use GRUB to boot both Ubuntu and WinXP (/dev/hda is your IDE hard disk and /dev/hda2 is the root/boot partition of your Ubuntu install).

1. Boot Ubuntu Live from the CD. 2. Mount the root/boot partition e.g. on /mnt/hda 3. sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda /dev/hda 4. Modify /mnt/hda/boot/grub/menu.lst to include your WinXP partition e.g. title Windows XP chainloader (hd0,0)+1

assuming WinXP is on the 1st partition of the first hard disk.

HTH Arun Khan