AFAIK the only way to boot off a CD is to set it up in BIOS to try firing up off a CD before trying the hard drive, and this of course is assuming that your BIOS supports such a thing in the first place, though it sounds like yours does.
By the time it's started looking at boot.ini, it won't be able to see the CD anyway until Windows has loaded. So that's a no-go area. Plus that file only supports hard drive/partitions anyway AFAIK.
Plus bootloaders and Windows have never really got on with each other and a screwed boot sector means nothing will boot then.
Edited by Neil Jones, 27 October 2005 - 03:01 PM.