What causes you bet can I fix a corrupt "boot.ini" record.?

One day my laptop just quit in work. The splash surface would come up single to progress to a black screen with a flashing white dot in the country. No keyboard commands would work besides the one to get into the Bios. My mom managed to rub everything off of the hard actuation, so she could start fresh and run the back-up disc that the personal made when I first got it. Upon running the disk associate error came leading stating there was a corrupt "boot.ini" file. Can I fix this or should I simply throw the desolate piece of technology into the wall and be through beside it? More importantly... what does the file do and what could have caused it to be corrupt?