CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 4: Diagnosing and Troubleshooting in the Windows OS       9  Troubleshooting the Windows Start-up “Journey”

General Boot Sequence 1 Windows 9x Boot Sequence

This is where the start up gets OS specific. On NT family, ntldr file gets loaded which searches and interprets the boot.ini file. Boot.ini is a text file with information for a boot menu.

Ntldr, boot.ini, Ntdetect.com are in the root directory and Ntoskrnl.exe is in a system32 directory. If some of them are not, you can copy files from them installation CD using Recovery Console, See more about that under Black screen subtitle of this chapter.

For example: If you want to dual boot Windows 2000 with Windows XP first install Windows 2000. In case you have Windows XP already installed and you need to install Windows 2000 do the following: Back up your NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files. After you install Windows 2000 you’ll not be able to use Windows XP unless you restore those two files to their original location!

General Boot Sequence 1 Windows 9x Boot Sequence