Boot Disk (xp proffessional)

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What is a Boot Disk,What is on it and how would i make one without a AFLOPPY drive.Mines not working.Thanks.

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A boot disk is a floppy disk, zip disk, CD or other external media that is used to start your computer when it won’t bootup from the hard drive. You can get the necessary file for any Windows OS at bootdisk.com. If your floppy isn’t working just burn them on to a CD and the next time Windows won’t start, just pop in the CD and boot up to troubleshoot your system. HTH.

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I think there are a couple of prerequisites for booting from a CD that need mentioning, relating to the BIOS of your computer:
1) It needs to be able to support booting from a CD (most recent ones will)
2) You need to set the boot order so that the CD boots before the hard disk for this particular instance. It is arguable whether you leave this as your default setting — personally I would (almost) always want to boot from the hard disk!

John

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You’re absolutely right John. I should have mentioned the need to set the boot order to boot frrom the CD.

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That’s an excellent point, John, about the need to set the BIOS boot order. Personally, I have set mine quite some time ago to boot first from CD, then floppy and finally hard disk. I’ve never had a problem with leaving that setup in place, for if I DON’T have a CD or floppy in the respective drives, the machine will boot as normal, from the hard drive. Even if one accidently leaves a non-bootable disk in the CD or floppy device, the machine should boot from the master hard drive. It’s a lot less trouble than remembering to re-set the parameters when needed.

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Big Al, I endorse that tactic of setting the booting to the CD, then floppy, and then HD. I arrived at that solution after having to change the boot order several times. It may slow down the booting a bit, but I can live with that.

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Doc,

If you are looking for troubleshooting help look at Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD. Really good stuff.

Joe

--Joe

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Joe,

Thanks for the tip. I saw your link to this in another thread and followed that. Great looking stuff !! I didn’t have time to give it a good look, but what I saw was impressive. I hope to have time to revisit it this weekend.

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Doc, is there a special method needed to use the 6 Windows floppy disc setup files to create a boot CD? I don’t have a floppy drive but have a USB floppy drive. I downloaded the XP Pro files and used them to create a set of boot floppies. Would like to leave the BIOS setting as it is (boot from CD first) and therfore wish to create a boot CD. Have read instructions for using Nero or Easy CD Creator to make a boot CD from a floppy, but the instructions mention only one floppy, not 6.
I have both Nero and ECDC.
Many thanks
Dianne

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Thank you very much.

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Hi Dianne,

There are several ways to accomplish this task. The one from Bootdisk.com looks like your best bet. It tells you how to get the necessary files from your hard drive or a floppy. It uses Easy CD Creator in the example, but I’d bet that Nero will do the job as well. The next is from Paul Thurrott and involves creating a bootable XP CD with SP2 slipstreamed on it. Thirdly is “Barts Way” and involves a variation on the Microsoft bootable CD concept.

Check out these sites and see which method seems to be right for you and then if you have any questions, post back and we’ll try to help you work through it. HTH

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A quick question- I had checked out the bootdisk.com “recipe” previously , as well as the other sites you have recommended (concentrated on bootdisk.com because it looked the simplest and quickest way), and noted that one floppy (“a bootable floppy”) was involved. Do I assume I can collate the files on the 6 MS floppies and that Nero will somehow combine them into a boot CD?

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Dianne,

I apologise. I seem to have misled you. I didn’t understand your question or misread your original post and mistakenly directed you to a site to create a boot disk from your floppys. I believe, as Joe has suggested, that these are used to install XP when your system won’t boot from a CD and are not a “boot disk ” by definition. In any event, if you are using them in an external floppy drive connected via USB or Firewire they wouldn’t do you any good because the system won’t recognize USB or Firewire until it boots into Windows. There are some good tips in the other posts to the thread and the best of the lot seems to be BartPE.

Since the floppy drive is all but dead in the computer industry and about to join the legacy hardware scrap heap, the external drive is a great “just-in-case” tool to have around, but I’d suggest you retire the floppy disks and build yourself a BartPE CD.

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Thank you, Doc. Will proceed with Bart’s method-looks challenging but a perfect way to fill in odd hours over a long weekend!
Dianne

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Doc, I’ve got a curveball question that may help Dianne but I ask it of you because of your links. I haven’t made a bootable CD since Win98SE days and it was a DOS boot CD, not Windows. At that time the Roxio software required ONE bootable floppy only. I have no familiarity with the six disks Dianne is talking about, but…

Way back when I first started using XP Pro, I made an emergency startup floppy for my XP Pro machine. I don’t think I found the instructions at Bootdisk.Com but that site does provide the three files needed. This startup disk is for an otherwise healthy system, in which the boot files or the master boot record may have gotten corrupt. You copy the following three files to a floppy disk (from your boot drive’s root directory): BOOT.INI, NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR (no extension). This floppy disk WILL boot into XP as usual and I’m wondering if one were to feed THIS floppy to a CD burning program like Nero, if it would create the same effect on a CD? (I will try it when I can, but thought I would ask) I also note that the three files on my machine now have recent dates and it looks like they were updated by SP2. The three corresponding files at Bootdisk.Com may be downlevel from SP2.

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You can’t really build a “boot floppy” or “boot CD” for Windows XP systems – it’s not like the old days of DOS or Win9x.

You can use an old Windows 98 boot floppy to boot a PC and access FAT or FAT32 disks, but this won’t be able to do anything to data on NTFS partitions.

You could boot a Linux CD, such as Knoppix, and use this to access your Windows disk drives – but Knoppix only gives Read access to NTFS disks.

Another option would be to build a bootable Windows PE CD like the one that Drive Image uses for mapping network drives and restoring partitions. I have never tried doing this and I have no idea how difficult it is or what functionality you can build in.

StuartR

Edited by StuartR to add
I have just re-read the whole thread, and I realised that post 462540 has a pointer to a better solution than any of these. Now I’m off to build a new bootable CD.

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Well, I guess you’re right, Stuart, but then again… this modified quote from Doc’s earlier post: [indent]

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…A boot disk is used to start your computer when it won’t bootup from the hard drive

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[/indent] So, the complication in this day and age is: what is the user intending to DO on the thus booted machine? I don’t understand Dianne’s intent, for example, for the six MS provided floppies are intended to substitute for a machine that will NOT boot the Windows installation CD (at least I think that’s what they’re for). And yet she’s wanting to put that all on a bootable CD. I understand that one can possibly start a computer from Linux or Knoppix or whatever and gain “some” access to the system. I guess where I’m trying to go on this topic is that the question of “making a boot disk(ette)” seems to beg a followup question: ” … for what purpose …”

One can boot a computer 1) from an earlier version of “DOS” such as my Win98SE floppy and NOT have access to NTFS partitions 2) have an XP emergency startup diskette handy which starts XP – my previous post 3) from another operating system, or 4) have WinXP create a “DOS” boot floppy which is similar to my #1 except that it is WinME based.

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Hi Al,

I’ll jump in here very late. Anyway, I believe that the 6 floppies are intended to be used to install XP when the target PC can not be booted from a CD. See Clean Install for links to versions for XPH & XPP. They are not intended to be used to gain access to an unbootable system. Here’s an interesting link if you need read only access to an NTFS volume from a DOS boot disk Boot Disk Windows XP 2000 NT – NTFS.com.

Here’s a KB article How To Create a Boot Disk for an NTFS or FAT Partition in Windows XP detailing what you had outlined about building an XP boot disk. That is fine if you want to try to repair an MBR or some other very simple task. Better yet, is using Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD which will give you a much better environment.

Joe

--Joe

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> Better yet, is using Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD which will give you a much better environment.

I just built this and booted it – I’m sufficiently impressed that the CD has joined my bag of tools.

StuartR

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Well, I’m headed out for a few hours, but after Doc’s, Joe’s and your endorsements, I think I’ll build me a “Bart CD” this evening and see “whasssuup…”

Edited: Oops, I meant to add that I tried feeding the XP Startup diskette (with the three files mentioned earlier) to Nero to build a bootable CD and – no soap! I kinda suspected that would be the case.

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Joe,

I’ve been re-reading this thread and came to the same conclusion that you did. That set of 6 floppys has to be for a clean install of XP when it won’t boot to the CD directly. Dianne asking for a boot disk threw me off track. I always thought that the easiest way to boot an uncooperative XP system was from the original installation CD with the BIOS boot sequence set to boot from the CD first. One could then access the Recovery Console or do a repair installation.

I can see from Stuart’s last post that he checked out Bart’s PE CD and is sufficently impressed to add it to his kit. That’s a good enough endorsement for me. I haven’t gotten around to checking on it and have to thank Stuart for taking the plunge.

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