BOOT.INI Required for Repair Process w/o Emergency Repair Disk (139894)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
  • Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 3.5
  • Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 3.51
  • Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0
  • Microsoft Windows NT Server 3.5
  • Microsoft Windows NT Server 3.51
  • Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
This article was previously published under Q139894

If you do not have an emergency repair disk (ERD) available, you can still repair a Windows NT installation by using the 3 setup disks to boot the system with disk 1. You can often boot the system if your CDRom drive supports bootable CD's (the El Torito CDRom specification). Once setup has begun, select the R option to repair the NT installation. When setup asks if you have a ERD disk, select no and setup will look at the boot.ini file for an installation path. Setup will try to find the repair directory from that path (%SystemRoot%\Repair) and use the registry files in that directory for repairs.



For additional information, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: 102873
TITLE : Boot.ini and ARC Path Naming Conventions

Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:5/7/2003
Keywords:KB139894
©2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.