I have a custom boot.ini file that does the showgui and all that jazz. Anyway, the procedure I use right now is to delete the current boot.ini after first boot and copy my custom to the C drive. This works MOST of the time but in some cases it breaks and the boot file gets weird...some ppm flag gets put in there aswell as a bad default entry that leads to a hall.dll error (unless you choose the right boot). Not sure what that problem is but manually replacing the boot.ini file seems to work.

So my question is, can I put my custom boot.ini file in the installation media itself so that when windows installs, it puts MY boot.ini file on C: instead of the one it would normally create?

Thanks,

Hi Jadestar,

you can easily use the command "bootcfg" to add the switches you want to your "boot.ini" file.

An example:

bootcfg /raw "/PAE /3GB /USERVA=3072" /a /ID 1

The command "/raw" says, that the following switches "/PAE /3GB /USERVA=3072" should be added, the "/a" after that says, that the switches

should be added to the existing switches in your "boot.ini" and not to overwrite them. "/ID 1" is the "ID" of your "boot.ini" entry which starts at "1".

Hope I could help you.

Edited May 15, 201016 yr by HØLLØW

If I may, a small addition, there are two "BOOTCFG" programs, one in Recovery Console and one in "normal" XP with slightly different behaviour/switches.

Most of the references you find around, including those on MS site are for the RC version, here is reference for BOTH:

http://ss64.com/nt/bootcfg.html

It seems like it's use is documented for XP only from RC :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980/en-us

whilst on Server2003 it is detailed for both programs:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317521/en-us

These are also interesting:

( the "normal" bootcfg is in XP PRO but not in Home)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;289022

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303980/en-us

jaclaz