| To manually configure the Windows NT boot process, you need to edit a file called BOOT.INI. It is a hidden file on the root of the boot partition.
BOOT.INI contains different sections, of which these are the most important:
Note that these section headings include the square brackets around them in the actual BOOT.INI file.
BOOT LOADER
Boot Loader contains information about the operation of the boot loader itself.
OPERATING SYSTEMS
This contains the paths to every available operating system that the boot loader can load.
Options for the configuration:
- /NOSERIALMICE=COM1,2,3,4,etc
You can disable the detection of serial mice for a particular port or all ports.
- /BASEVIDEO
This forces NT to load into the standard VGA mode (640x480, 16 colors)
- /CRASHDEBUG
This option allows the automatic recovery and restart feature of NT.
- /SOS
Allows the displaying of the driver names as they are loaded by the boot process.
- /NODEBUG
Disables the monitoring of the boot process. Gives a slight performance advantage in loading the OS.
- /MAXMEM:n
Limits the amount of memory available to NT.
- /SCSIORDINAL:n
If you have multiple identical SCSI controllers, this allows you to select the SCSI card to boot from.
There are several ways to edit the BOOT.INI file. You can use the System Option in the Control Panel to safely change the boot options, or you can edit the file with a text editor like NOTEPAD.EXE or EDIT.COM. To edit the file directly, first change the file attribute to disable read-only status. After editing the file, you should reset the read-only attribute.
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