Quake3World

I know this is a stupid question, but isn't the boot.ini file vital to windows booting?

My buddy called me last night and said when he boots his computer, WINdows XP Home, it says "boot.ini is not valid, booting [or copying.....not sure which one he said] from C:Windows

and then it starts fine.

If I understand correctly, boot.ini tells windows what drive, partition and folder to find the files it needs to boot up. It should be in the root directory of the hard drive you boot off, for most people C:\boot.ini

Sounds like your friend's one isnt there anymore so windodws is copying a default one from C:\windows\

When he's in windows you can check if it's in C:\ by browsing there in explorer (making sure show hidden & system files is set in tools folder options view "show hidden files" & uncheck "hide protected OS files").

Hope this helps