I've been googling for several hours now but still haven't been able to solve this problem, so any help would be greatly appreciated! (If you want to save time, you can jump straight to bullet point 4.))
1.) I'm running Windows XP SP3 as my primary OS on a MacbookPro via Bootcamp. Today I wanted to enter safe mode, but when keeping F8 pressed, Windows wouldn't start but got stuck on a black screen with a blinking cursor. After this Windows hasn't started at all.
2.) I figured maybe boot.ini got corrupted or something like that. So I booted into mac and since I have NTFS-3G installed, I edited boot.ini a couple of times, but it didn't solve the original problem.
3.) However, after tweaking for some time, restarting the computer a couple of times, installing the newest SMC Firmware update and a security update via update manager etc, something suddenly changed in the boot.ini. When opening it with textedit, instead of showing what you'd expect from boot.ini, it had just the following text-content: 47932C8A-4A73-459A-9FE3-0DE53298469E
4.) I tweaked some more, and it disappeared altogether. I enabled viewing hidden/invisible files in the Terminal, and now it is displayed as an uneditable folder with nothing in it:
If I delete it, it will immediately be recreated. If I try to save a new boot.ini, I will get some kind of error message: "The name "boot.ini" is already taken. Please choose a different name." or "The document "boot.txt" could not be saved as "boot.ini". The file does not exist."
5.) Now I have no idea if I even have a proper boot.ini file, but in any case I cannot access or edit it, and hence cannot begin to solve my original problem. I've reached a dead end with my skills and knowledge, so any pointers would be worth gold now. Thanks in advance!
1.) I'm running Windows XP SP3 as my primary OS on a MacbookPro via Bootcamp. Today I wanted to enter safe mode, but when keeping F8 pressed, Windows wouldn't start but got stuck on a black screen with a blinking cursor. After this Windows hasn't started at all.
2.) I figured maybe boot.ini got corrupted or something like that. So I booted into mac and since I have NTFS-3G installed, I edited boot.ini a couple of times, but it didn't solve the original problem.
3.) However, after tweaking for some time, restarting the computer a couple of times, installing the newest SMC Firmware update and a security update via update manager etc, something suddenly changed in the boot.ini. When opening it with textedit, instead of showing what you'd expect from boot.ini, it had just the following text-content: 47932C8A-4A73-459A-9FE3-0DE53298469E
4.) I tweaked some more, and it disappeared altogether. I enabled viewing hidden/invisible files in the Terminal, and now it is displayed as an uneditable folder with nothing in it:
If I delete it, it will immediately be recreated. If I try to save a new boot.ini, I will get some kind of error message: "The name "boot.ini" is already taken. Please choose a different name." or "The document "boot.txt" could not be saved as "boot.ini". The file does not exist."
5.) Now I have no idea if I even have a proper boot.ini file, but in any case I cannot access or edit it, and hence cannot begin to solve my original problem. I've reached a dead end with my skills and knowledge, so any pointers would be worth gold now. Thanks in advance!