Rather ambitious I know, but I've been running my notebook as triple-boot with Windows Vista and XP, with a dash of Linux on the side. It all worked fine until I changed the version of Linux to Ubuntu. That's not a criticism of Ubuntu in and of itself but that the installation process damaged Windows XP.

Selecting Windows XP in the startup menu produced an error message that ntldr couldn't be found. Normally in this situation the easiest way to get Windows working again is to reinstall/repair. But this meant a lot of work reinsatating Vista and Ubuntu.

So I had a nose around the Microsoft KnowledgeBase and found instructions of how to replace ntldr from a Windows CD. Once I'd got my hands on one it was the work of moments to copy the ntldr file back onto the computer.

Sadly this solved one problem only to reveal another. Now it seemed hal.dll could not be found. Back to the KnowledgeBase and an article that said this is actually a problem with the boot.ini file. Why the error message can't say this is a rant all of its own.

Thankfully there is a utility for repairing the boot.ini file and it gives a reasonable degree of control; I didn't want a utility that didn't ask me first because of the risk to the other operating systems. Well the bootcfg did allow me to add another entry rather than rebuild the list from scratch.

Maybe I should take this as a lesson not to be so ambitious (even though it's all working now), but it is boot problems are very frustrating. And I would have been completely lost without a Windows install CD.