Well earlier today my computer just 'gave up' on me... i booted back in and it gave me a message saying my boot.ini file was corrupted... i have a secondary PC, which is how i am typing this... how do i repair/correct/replace/whatever the boot.ini? im using the 10 year old pc right now... and i cant stand the slowness LOL...
Thanks.
SimiIs this pc switching on so that you can repair the boot.ini file?
If not you will need to safe mode and find that file. then let know whats inside, open it with textpad please.Dude... i cant even get past my BIOS screen... and i dont even know how to find that file...

EDIT: oh yes it is a laptop... is it possible for me to remove the HD from the laptop and plug it into the PC im using? (im assuming its on the HD becasue its a file )You need to find your Windows XP CD. Put it in the drive on the laptop and boot up, press whatever KEY lets you choose the boot device (On a Dell it's F12) and tell it to boot from the CD. Once it has finished loading choose R for repair. It will take you into the repair console. From there run fixboot. Next run bootcfg /Rebuild.

That should repair your boot.ini and rebuild your boot partition and you should now be able to boot into windows again.do you have your windows xp cd or restore cd? a msdos boot disk? if you have any of those, do this:(its sorta complicated, it happened to my computer and i didnt know the admin pass... rrgh)

2.Insert the Windows XP CD-ROM into your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and then restart your computer.
3.When you receive the "Press any key to boot from CD" message, press a key to start your computer from the Windows XP CD-ROM.
4.When you receive the "Welcome to Setup" message, press R to start the Recovery Console.
5.If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot computer, select the installation that you have to use from the Recovery Console.
6.When it asks type the administrator password (just leave it blank if you've never changed it before) and then press enter
7.At the command prompt, type bootcfg /list, and then press enter. some entries in your current Boot.ini file appear on the screen
8.At the command prompt type bootcfg /rebuild, and then press enter. This command scans the hard disks of the computer for Windows XP, Microsoft Windows 2000, or Microsoft Windows NT installations, and then shows up the results. Follow the instructions that come up to add the Windows installations to the Boot.ini file.

If that doesn't work have some store like microcenter or geek squad re-install your os and see if they can recover any of your files.i did what ms_dos_sucks said and got it working(which means i can log back in to windows, thankfully no corrupted files yay!)... but the problem is that i have a ubuntu linux partiton on there too... how do i FIX that one because i lost my ubuntu disk and i am not downlading that again on dial-up...What bootloader did you use when setting up Ubuntu ? ?
If you head to their site they will send you up to 10 CD's FREE...Find your Bootsect.lnx file on the ubuntu partition and copy it to a floppy or something, then boot into windows, copy it to the C:\ drive and edit your boot.ini. Just add C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="Linux" to the end of the file and then reboot. It should work.
I used GRUB.

I am not a freeloader.

and TheEmperor's way worked.

(Sorry for booting such an old thread )I never implied you were a freeloader and i'm glad you are fixed up...