In article writes:

Speaking of semi-modern operating systems, how do you make a bootable
floppy on Win2000?

First question is what OS do you want that floppy to boot.

DOS 6.22 would be nice. g I was talking someone with a Mackie
HDR24/96 through a "it won't boot" problem and I wanted to see if it
was able to boot from a floppy disk. I have a 6.2 boot floppy that I
keep around here for emergencies (and I know that will work on the
Mackie) but I didn't figure that he would. I discovered that making a
DOS boot floppy was an option on XP, so I made one, tried it on the
HDR24/96 and it worked. It even allowed me to look at the hard drive.

I first tried making a bootable floppy on the Win2K machine (because
that's where I was sitting at the time) and that's when I recognized
that the option wasn't available.

So, to answer your question, I don't really care. I just want to boot
a Pentium and be able to see a prompt. If I can see the hard drive,
that would be nice, too. The HDR uses FAT32 on the hard drive, so I
suppose that matters.

It turns out that any diskette formatted normally on an XP or Win2k system
is in some sense bootable. However, it lacks what it takes to boot something
useful. However, if you copy a few files onto it, namely NTLDR,
NTDETECT.COM and BOOT.INI you get a floppy that will boot a program that
will prompt you to boot predefined various OS kernels on just about any mass
storage device that is active at the time. The definitions are in BOOT.INI.

That's nice to know, but probably not appropriate in this instance.
What I was hoping for was an equivalent to the old "format a: /s" DOS
command.

There is also a website http://www.bootdisk.com/ that provides the means to
make bootable disks for any number of different legacy DOS and Unix-type
systems.

Thanks. I think that's the answer I got last time I asked, probably
from you. I should bookmark that one. No, actually I should write it
down on paper. Bookmarks are different from computer to computer.
Paper is there as long as you can find it.





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