Lost boot.ini

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I have a PC dual booting with Win98SE and 2000Pro. I backup all hard drives using an HP Colorado tape drive. I finally installed McAfee Viruscan only to discover that I had the dreaded Empire Monkey boot sector virus. I then booted from an AV clean boot disk and cleaned the virus. On rebooting my machine the op system choice window comes up and 2000 works fine but if I choose 98 it can’t find win.com + all the other main win startup files.

On looking in expore in 2000 (All partitions are FAT32) boot.ini has gone missong.

Whe i go to restore this from backup I cannot restore it on it’s own as this file is part of the “System State” as defined by the HP Colorado backup software. When I try to restore the system state, the whole process runs through fine but it does not restore boot.ini.

Any thoughts

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You don’t have a boot.ini? It’s a hidden, read-only, system file, so it’s possible that you just can’t see it based on your view settings in Windows.

If your boot sector got hosed, the easiest and most effective way to restore full functionality is to re-run Windows 98 setup, and the run the Repair process for 2000. This will:

Recreate the WIndows 98 boot sector.
Restore dual-boot capability by moving this new, good boot sector to BOOTSECT.DOS, which the NT loader will pass control to if you decide to use 98.

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