Thanks for that. It looks like the perfect solution - that, or using grub as my boot loader, as it has an option to not display the menu unless the user presses escape. However, what I have tried is making the recovery partition 1st on the drive, and the main partition 2nd. To load Windows, I call ...........partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" from boot.ini, which lives in C:\, my recovery partition. Windows XP loads fine at first, but then seems to pause at the welcome screen, showing only the (small) Windows XP logo and the words "Windows XP". Normally, it would say "Welcome" (IIRC) or something underneath this. The computer isn't frozen, I can move the mouse around. The hard drive light acts as though I was sitting at the desktop - small, occasional bits of activity. I'll try safe mode soon, and maybe chkdsk. Might be an imaging problem. I used ImageX to transfer the image from another PC onto this partition, as Acronis can't pxe-deploy on a partition basis - it would wipe the drive. The image is from a PC with only one partition, nothing fancy, and the system drive is of course C:. EDIT: Sorted it out. Deleting the DosDevices section in the registry was all that was needed. It's running perfectly now, with no boot loader needed.