How to make a bootable diskette

[jmsrickland]

I have the DOS library on my XP hard drive and would like to copy it to a diskette and make the diskette bootable so I can start my PC at the DOS level. How do I that, please?

[schoolbusdriver]

Put a floppy in the A drive, right-click on it in explorer, pick "Format", select "Create an MS-DOS startup disk"..... Easy.

[jmsrickland]

OK, but when I try this

CD C:\

I get an Invalid drive specification and I know there's a C drive because that's where my XP is.

[Siddharth Rout]

OK, but when I try this

CD C:\

I get an Invalid drive specification and I know there's a C drive because that's where my XP is.

what are you trying to do? and where are you typing this?

If you are in A: and you want to go to C: then you need to simply type

A:\> C: to move to C:

CD stands for change directory so for example if you want to move to say temp folder in C: then you need to type the following in C:

C:\> CD Temp

or

A:\> CD C:\Temp from A:

Hope this is what you want...

[jmsrickland]

A:\> C:

Tried that too.

I'm beginning to think the problem is that the C drive (or C directory) is formatted in NTFS and not FAT32

[k1ll3rdr4g0n]

A:\> C:

Tried that too.

I'm beginning to think the problem is that the C drive (or C directory) is formatted in NTFS and not FAT32

This is correct. The partition that is labeled as "c" is probably formated as NTFS and DOS only knows FAT/FAT32. There are some NTFS drivers for DOS, but to actually get the data off the HD in DOS...you are getting nowhere fast.

I recommend BartPE if you need to pull some data off

[jmsrickland]

So basically that mean once you format in NTFS then these boot diskettes are useless.

What I need to do is to restore a few files that belongs to XP (like boot.ini for example)

[k1ll3rdr4g0n]

BartPE would be your best bet. Unless you want to fuss around with NTFS drivers for DOS...be my guest .

[jmsrickland]

OK, thanks alot. I will download that BartPE.

[Lord Orwell]

So basically that mean once you format in NTFS then these boot diskettes are useless.

What I need to do is to restore a few files that belongs to XP (like boot.ini for example)

you can download a bootdisk set for windows 2000. They take up four floppies but support ntfs. Alternatively you could run (from inside windows) the install program on the cd with the /cmdcons switch to install a boot option to boot into recovery console. Note it only works for the cd.