Today I tried to help a friend to repair his lost ntldr but without the right toolbox at hand we couldn’t help but reinstall XP. My first-aid spblinux boot CD could not talk to the USB ADSL modem so I couldn’t ask Google while being at the friend’s place :-/ Opening the recovery console (the R key of the XP installation CD) without having any knowledge is futile too…
Later on I did a short research and found something in the web which I might have the chance to try if I get confronted with a broken xp startup like this again:
c: CD \ ATTRIB -H boot.ini ATTRIB -S boot.ini ATTRIB -R boot.ini MOVE boot.ini boot.ini.bak BOOTCFG /Rebuild CHKDSK /R /F FIXBOOT
