This is good advise. You have to make sure the drive is physically OK first. If you lost that file due to a bad drive cluster, its only going to get worse. If you know someone with GRC Spinrite, use it. If you have a bad cluster get your data off of it and buy a new drive. Yes, you can reformat and the system will mark the cluster as bad and work for some time. That is a time bomb waiting to happen. GRC Spinrite will actually recover corrupt data by moving data from bad clusters to good clusters. You need to get the missing file on a thumb drive and use Winternals or UbuntuLive and copy the "good" file up to replace the "bad" one. BUT, I would try to replace the boot.ini first. That might actually be your issue. This is a little tricky though. If you could just check to see if its there and says something like: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect Your cool there... Your PC must have come with some disks. Try to get to the recovery console & type: fixboot