Using “Knoppicillin” a variant of Knoppix, which is a Linux distribution, which runs off CD/DVD, I was able to recover my Windows XP from a boot failure within minutes.
Yesterday I changed my laptop’s partitions using Acronis’ DiskDirector. I realized, that I still had a recovery partition on it, which is more or less useless for me, i.e. 8GB wasted. This recovery partition is pre-installed by Sony and basically replaces the Windows XP installation DVD, so that Sony can save a dollar or two 
I have my own recovery images (frequently updated using TrueImage), so I really don’t need that pre-installed recovery partition.
DiskDirector easily lets you remove, resize and move partitions on your hard drives. I’ve used it a couple of times before, so I was sure it’ll be an easy job again.
Murphy hit though: “Windows can not boot due to a partition configuartion error.” (or similar) on boot, after DiskDirector finished. Great!
F8 still worked, but same error message even for console mode. Too bad! Well, what could be the reason? Certainly not a random HD crash or something, F8 wouldn’t work in that case most likely. What if DiskDirector “forgot” to update boot.ini, where Windows marks its startup partition? I removed the first partition of my drive, so for sure boot.ini needs updated.
But how to check boot.ini, if F8 won’t even let you boot into console mode? Boot from an external device – right! I remembered I had a copy of c’t magazine (Germany’s major PC magazine), which came with a CD, that had a bootable Knoppix V5.2 on it. (Actually it is Knoppicillin, which is based on Knoppix and adds some “non-free” stuff like virus scanners etc).
Note: There are other boot-from-somedevice solutions, which may be great as well. I’m describing Knoppix, because I get frequent updates through my c’t magazine subscription, and do not need to download it – in the case I need it …
Booted it up, a GUI Desktop showed up. I found MidnightCommander installed, so no VI nightmares 
Under /media I found a few entries, and a “mount /media/sda1″ gave me access to my C: drive. I changed boot.ini from
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2) to multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
and crossed fingers for a reboot. And hurray, Window’s boot showed up 
Shame on Acronis to forget about boot.ini 
( I used 9.1, and 10.0 is current. Hopefully they fixed that bug already)
Kudos to the Knopper team!
Knoppix is a German Linux distribution, which runs completely from CD or DVD and provides a really rich selection of hardware dirvers and additional software. The CD edition can hold up to 2GB of software – they are using “on-the-fly” compression to achieve that.
The important thing (for me) is, that it has read/write drivers for NTFS and MidnightCommander (a Linux “Norton Commander” clone) pre-installed.
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