Possible to work without boot.ini?

I was trying to clone bootItNG to clone my primary partition. AFter that I uninstalled bootItNG. Now there is boot.ini in my primary partition. Yet the system works as before. Many in this forum said that if you don’t have boot.ini, the system won’t boot. But mine does. By the way after that I used XXClone to clone again. Now in the target partition I have boot.ini (XXClone created that). How is it I am able to boot without boot.ini? Is there some other way Windows handles the booting process?