Reinstalled xp on my NC10 using a thumb drive. Whole process went ok. However, when I try to boot without the thumb drive, i only get a blank screen with a flashing dash. It does boot from the thumb drive when it is inserted. I did a search for boot.ini on my HDD, but nothing came up. Where should it be? Shall I copy the file from the USB to the root drive? The HDD has two partitions and XP is installed on E drive. Thats the second partition, so afaik, the command in the bootloader should be multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS The boot.ini on the USB is multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS Presumably the HDD is rdisk1 when USB is primary boot source. Ive set rdisk to 0 and set HDD to primary......but I still get the flashing dash. I tried fixmbr from the recovery console to no avail. system partition is the C drive. according to DISKPART, that drive is partition 3 in disk 0. XP is on the smaller E drive, but there are two partitions appearing on diskpart of that size.....partition 1 is listed as extended and 2 as logical. i dont understand as there are only two partitions on my HDD. how do i go about this? many thanks in advance!