This morning when I get into work there was a Critical Update waiting for me. I installed it on my XP machine at home, no problem, so I figured it would be the same thing here. Nope. After the reboot it said that my boot.ini file was invalid, and then there was a problem with NTOSKRNL.EXE. After some head-scratching I fired up the bootable Win2k CD and went to the recovery console to look at what was in boot.ini. That’s funny, it’s just not there! Lemme go look on a co-worker machine… hey, it’s not there either! The fix wound up being creating a new boot.ini from scratch, and making an educated guess about which disk/partition my installation was on.

I was half-tempted to just wipe and reformat, then put XP on, but I’ve got so much configuring that I would need to do (mail, Visual Studio, little apps, etc.) that it would probably take most of the damn day. Hey, I figure 2 hours lost isn’t really all that bad, so I just made a fresh Emergency Repair Disk and chalked it up to experience.