Copy ntldr ….Access Denied

I’m trying to use the copy command to restore the ntldr file to my winnt root dir. however everytime I enter the the command
Copy D:\i386\ntldr C:\ or C:\ntldr I get the message “access denied”. I don’t seem to be able to copy any file to the rootdirectory but I am able to copy any file to say, the winnt dir. I tryed first to use my erd disk to repair the problem but because I had modified the boot.ini file without then updating the erd it doesn’t seem to work now.
But I should be able to restore the ntldr file from the the recovery console and I can’t get by the access denied message.