- Can't boot from floppy anymore
- Posted by Michael on March 29th, 2008
I have a dual boot system with XP and Vista and I can't boot from a floppy
anymore. This happened after I installed Vista. Does this have something to
do with BCDEdit? Anyway I can fix this? I already have "boot from a floppy"
enabled in BIOS.
- Posted by Frankster on March 29th, 2008
"Michael" <nospam@email.com> wrote in message
news:eOJZ7UUkIHA.5280@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
What OS does the floppy have on it?
-Frank
- Posted by Michael on March 29th, 2008
the floppy has XP
- Posted by Lang Murphy on March 29th, 2008
"Michael" <nospam@email.com> wrote in message
news:O7LhyUVkIHA.5080@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
Uh... what? Never heard of a bootable XP floppy. Most likely, you have a DOS
bootable diskette with drivers to access FAT32 and/or NTFS disks.
What errors are you getting when you try to boot from the disk?
Lang
- Posted by Spirit on March 29th, 2008
Check the BIOS and put the Floppy as the 1st boot device to check.
"Michael" <nospam@email.com> wrote in message
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- Posted by David Webb on March 29th, 2008
Here's some insight from those who dared:
http://www.msfn.org/board/Vista-Boot-Disk-t95092.html
"Michael" <nospam@email.com> wrote in message
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- Posted by philo on March 29th, 2008
"Lang Murphy" <lang_murphy@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:89D20A14-FFA1-4A80-B4F1-5E57A20E8667@microsoft.com...
If you format a floppy on an XP machine then copy over the "boot" files
ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini the floppy will boot you right into XP .
Since Vista uses a different boot loader that boot floppy cannot work for
booting into Vista
- Posted by Michael on March 29th, 2008
that did the trick. I never had to do that before I installed Vista. Looks
like that BCD loads very early in the boot process
"Spirit" <noone@notthere.net> wrote in message
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- Posted by Bill in Co. on March 29th, 2008
philo wrote:
Interesting. I have a general question regarding the use of this specific
boot floppy. Can I assume the only time it could be useful is if one or
more of the three files (ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini) on the hard disk is
corrupted or missing? Or are there some other possible situations that
would allow it to boot where the HD wouldn't?
- Posted by Bill in Co. on March 31st, 2008
philo wrote:
Interesting. I have a general question regarding the use of this specific
boot floppy. Can I assume the only time it could be useful is if one or
more of the three files (ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini) on the hard disk is
corrupted or missing? Or are there some other possible situations that
would allow it to boot where the HD wouldn't?
- Posted by David Webb on March 31st, 2008
Refer to the section titled "Resolving startup issues with a boot floppy disk"
in the following tech article:
How to create a bootable floppy disk for an NTFS or FAT partition in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=305595
"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@earthlink.net> wrote in message
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- Posted by Bill in Co. on March 31st, 2008
Yes, it talks about a faulty boot sequence (which is slightly ambiguous).
But I have used DOS formatted bootup disks before, and my question was very
specific about this type of bootdisk, and if my assumptions below were
correct (about using this type of boot disk over the other DOS formatted
boot disk, which I'm pretty sure won't (normally) allow access to NTFS).
David Webb wrote:
- Posted by David Webb on March 31st, 2008
I think you misunderstand it's usage. The NT boot disk is not like the DOS boot
disk. It's only purpose is to bypass the normal startup from the HDD. It does
not contain an OS itself.
Regarding a DOS boot disk, similar to Win98's, it cannot natively read an NTFS
formatted drive, but there are 3rd party utilities available that can be used to
read and write NTFS files while in the DOS environment. This approach has mostly
been replaced by the use NT rescue discs similar to BartPE and UBCD4WIN, which
not only bootup from the CD, providing complete access to the mounted HDD, but
they also contain many of the utilities necessary for repair and backup of an NT
HDD.
"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@earthlink.net> wrote in message
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- Posted by Bill in Co. on March 31st, 2008
David Webb wrote:
OK, and this was leading me to wonder just how much use it really is (I'm
coming at this from a Win9x and DOS user standpoint). But the MS article
mentions some things that can go wrong on the HD where this could be handy,
although, in retrospect, I'm not sure how often those specific cases really
come up (in contrast with the cases where you need a "real" boot disk (to
repair the system, more like BartPE, or whatever)
Right, and I know of (and have) a few of those utilities. NTFS4DOS and
NTFSDOS30 come to mind. (Although some of these are read-only).
Right. I also have BartPE (but have only tried it out a couple of times
so far - no real need, as of yet :-).
Thanks for the info, Dave.
- Posted by Lang Murphy on April 8th, 2008
"philo" <philo@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:urlPopZkIHA.5396@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
Well... I guess we'll have to agree to disagree... loading the files you
list on a floppy will let you read/write to an NTFS disk, but by no means is
one -really- running XP after booting from such a floppy.
The MS KB article that discloses what you've listed above states: "This
step-by-step article describes how to create a bootable floppy disk for
Windows XP to access a drive with a faulty boot sequence on an
Intel-processor-based computer."
If one considers that "booted into XP" then I guess one is booted into XP. I
do not consider that functionality the same as "booting into XP."
Viva la difference.
Lang
- Posted by John John (MVP) on April 8th, 2008
philo wrote:
Lang Murphy wrote:
Gee, it takes one minute to make an NT boot floppy and boot the computer
with it, why not make one and try it then come back here and tell us the
results!
John
