Creating a Bootdisk
Creating a Windows bootdisk can be done in various ways. The easiest solution is if you actually have your original Windows installation CDs - the first one is a bootable CD. If you don't have those, the next best (or even better) thing is to get a complete boot CD suite which can not just boot, but also recover Windows, repair your system partition, etc. The most popular such suite currently out there is findLink(Spotmau PowerSuite).
Alternatively, you can go the hard way - create the bootdisk by yourself. For old Windows versions such as 95/98, you can create a bootdisk from Windows itself as follows:
Click Start / Settings / Control Panel / double-click the Add Remove programs icon / click the Startup Disk and create disk.
What you can also do for the older Windows versions is copy some additional files to the bootdisk after it is done. To do that, click Start / Shutdown and choose the option to restart the computer in a MS-DOS prompt. At the prompt, type:
cd \windows\command
and then
copy format*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy fdisk*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy mscdex*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy sys*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy edit*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy debug*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy himem*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
copy emm386*.* a: [PRESS ENTER]
In newer Windows versions, Microsoft has essentially already stopped to offer bootable floppy diskettes in favor of bootable CDs and has not included a method of easily creating a bootable floppy diskette in Windows XP, Vista, or 7.
See also:
