After reading about your problem its put me of external drives.
Don't do any of the below unless your certain its the boot.ini
If its your boot.ini that corrupt your have to do a repair using your OS cd, load up the cd when it gets to the blue menu and gives you a couple of options choose R (recovery console) after it goes through its stages, type 'bootcfg /rebuild' and hit enter. it will ask you to identify so you type windows home edition and hit enter.
If your lucky the boot.ini will be fix and your at least be able to get back into windows.
On another note.
Ubuntu got my pc out of a mess. Windows xp pro came up corrupt on startup, not even the repair would fix the boot.ini I was locked out of windows so i gave up and install Ubuntu so at the very least i could access the windows drive from ubuntu OS and backup all my important files to dvd, then reformat damn Windows and reinstall. But installing Ubuntu it fixed the problem cause Linux installs its own boot menu so you can choose either windows or Linux on startup. To my surprise there was WindowsXP alongside Ubuntu 9.10. I was able to get back into windows without having to reformat and start again.
Can't fix the bootup in windows, don't want to reformat, use ubuntu as the last resort. And its a good OS to use
