Showing boot.ini in wrong drive

[Asuman]

Hello Friends,

After installing couple of programs such as booteditor, bootlogo etc., it seems that my boot.ini file has moved to my D Drive instead of my C Drive. On my C drive i have installed Windows Xp whereas i had kept all my data in D drive.
It shows boot.ini file on d drive instaed of showing it in C drive. I tried to delete it from D dive, but couldn't succeed in it. Can any one tell me that how do i tell windows to look in the C drive for the boot.ini file? Does any one have any idea about this issue? Any help on this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Devasis]

You could delete the file and reboot. Boot into Recovery Console, then run the following commands (in order)

fixmbr
fixboot
bootcfg /rebuild

Please bear in mind that this is not a guaranteed method of fixing the issue - take a backup of important data just in case.

[Solomon]

This happens more often then you might think. And the only way to fix it is to reinstall. I always try to advise people that you should either disconnect or disable via bios all drives except the one you want to install windows to. Having quickboot enabled is often times the problem because bios does not differentiate between drive letters the way Windows does and it detects drives too quickly without configuring their respective settings. When you get to the option to format, make sure it's pointing to the correct drive path before smashing enter. I've done it myself several times without realizing it was wrong.

[MrChris-]

Accessing Disk Management

There are a few different ways to access Disk Management. I'll list three different methods so choose whichever is more convenient.

• Method 1 - Start--> Control Panel--> Performance and Maintenance--> Administrative Tools. Double click Computer Management and then click Disk Management in the left hand column.
  
• Method 2 - By default, Administrative Tools is not shown on the Start Menu but if you have modified the Start Menu (by right clicking the Start button and selecting Properties--> Customize) so it is shown then just select Start--> Administrative Tools--> Computer Management and then click Disk Management in the left hand column.
  
• Method 3 - Click Start--> Run and type diskmgmt.msc in the Open: line and click OK. The Disk Management snap-in will open.

Hope so it may help you out.

[Calvin K]

Something does seem strange. The XP RC I do not think will list ME as a OS, would suspect that XP is indeed on drive D:. Go into bios and post where each hdd is connected (IDE chanel- Master/Slave) , next find the boot option and post what is the sequences.
The most 2 reasons for hal.dll error is:-

1) It is indeed missing or courupt

2)The bootini file points to the wrong hdd or partition.

"config.sys and autoexec.bat" should both be empty.

[Lillebror]

If you only have one OS installed it makes sense to have it on the same partition. Otherwise you have two partitions you can't format without screwing up the install.

By the way, you probably know this but there is another way to edit or manipulate the boot.ini file if you are running XP. Right click My Computer. Click Properties--> Advanced--> Startup and recovery SETTINGS. This works no matter where boot.ini is.