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Possible to work without boot.ini?

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by davidpaul

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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?

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by bfilmfan

You have to have the boot.ini. You said there is a boot.ini in the primary partition. In the target partition, you have the boot.ini also.

What led you to believe you did not have a boot.ini?

by davidpaul

Poster rated this answer.
See my comments through which I found the boot.ini. Yet I would like to take my hats off to BFilmFan for the conviction that I have to have the boot.ini Thanks pal.

by davidpaul

Two things led me to believe that I did not have the boot.ini in source drive.
1. I could locate it in target drive and the cloning software (XXClone) said it will be creating its own boot.ini in the target.
2. I could not locate boot.ini in the source drive though my explorer view was enabled to view "view hidden files and folders". I was really confused because I could edit boot.ini (which looked different from the cloned one). I was wondering from where this boot.ini entires are coming. Then I searched the registry. I could easily locate the boot.ini entries in three places:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control]
"CurrentUser"="USERNAME"
"WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="20000"
"SystemStartOptions"="FASTDETECT NOEXECUTE=OPTIN"
"SystemBootDevice"="multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)"

The other two places were ...ControlSet003\Control and ...CurrentControlSet\Control" Thus I was convinced that because of these entries my system was functional. After all these searches, I realized that explorer view has one more option - "Hide Protected operating system files". Only when I unchecked this option I could see the "BOOT.INI".

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