100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

Short Description
Hack #94. Customize what and how you boot using the BOOT.INI file. The BOOT.INI file was introduced with Windows NT and lives on through. Windows 2000, XP …

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Content
PC
HACKS
Jim Aspinwall
100 Industrial-Strength
Tips & Tools
TMHack the Windows NT/2000/XP Boot Loader #94
Chapter 9, Boot-Up Hacks | 243
HACK
H A C K
#94
Hack the Windows NT/2000/XP Boot Loader Hack #94
Customize what and how you boot using the BOOT.INI file.
The BOOT.INI file was introduced with Windows NT and lives on through
Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 as a means to provide preboot reference to
where the operating system is located and control over which operating system
will be used. It allows users to select the DOS environment or the Windows
NT environment (which does not support many of the applications
and direct hardware access that DOS does). BOOT.INI can also be modified
to support the addition of another drive that has an operating system
installed (perhaps unknown to the operating system on the first/original
disk drive), giving you multiboot support to a non-Microsoft OS.
BOOT.INI is a plain-text file (equivalent to DOS’s IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS)
that resides in the root directory of your boot disk and is read by the
NTLDR program when the system is starting up. It is saved with…