XP Bootdisk

[Tesseract]

How do you create a bootdisk for Windows XP that works in a way similar to the one in Windows 95/98/Me and will read NTFS partitions?

[freeza]

if you go into my computer and right click the floppy drive icon and go to format the screen that pops up should have a ms-dos startup option..im not sure how good it works...i've never tried it.

[ritsuke Veteran]

When you make bootdisks in Win2k it creates 4 disks including the reading of NTFS partitions...I wonder how it works in XP (not having it installed myself right now)

[Tesseract]

freexa: I tried that and it creates an MS-DOS boot disk that does not read NTFS.

Ritsuke: How would you create these boot disks under Windows 2000 (This would probably be the same under Windows XP)?

[ritsuke Veteran]

With WIN2K, I use my original CD and use the 'makeboot' utility. This creates the 4 disk boot/setup disks.

The location is typically here:

cdrom:bootdiskmakeboot a:

If you don't have them, you can grab them, in image form, from this location:

http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html

click on bootdisks > scroll down to 'The Village Idiot's Boot Disks' - pick the different Win2K Prof. imgs. with the makeboot utility

hope that helps

[Tesseract]

Does these bootdisks allow you to boot to a command line/recovery program or do they just run the setup program for Windows 2000/XP?

BTW, there is no bootdisk directory on the Windows XP cd, but I am downloading the disk images for Win2000. I also have 5 Win XP Beta 2 disks, but they appear to just attempt to run the setup program for Windows XP.

[Spanky2710]

This site has tons of XP info including a link to "Make my Windows XP CD bootable"

http://www.xs4all.nl/~binkbv/windowsxp/

I haven't tried it, but it looks like it should work.

[Spanky2710]

Also i know there is a utility called ntfs2dos i believe that will allow you to see NTFS partitions from dos. you can use that with a 9x bootdisk so you can get to the command prompt. I'm not sure where to get it, but it's just a tiny exe.

[skisteven1]

In windows 2000, any restore or help programs that you might need are on the CD. When I crashed my machine, I had to boot to the CD, and use the utils from there. I believe the same is true in WinXP. I know that not all the CD's are bootable, but I'm pretty sure 2600 is. The utils on the Win2k CD were all I needed at the time. Hope I helped.

-SkiSteven1

[Tesseract]

Does the MFT have to be contiguous?

Where can I download ntfs2dos?

[Tesseract]

Also, will the Windows 2000 bootdisk and tools work with Windows XP?

[ritsuke Veteran]

http://www.sysinternals.com is where you can get ntfsdos...the free version is read-only to the ntfs partition...You can pay extra for the professional one - http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware...tfsdospro.shtml

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware...e/NTFSDOS.shtml

here's from the site:

'If you are interested in accessing NTFS drives from Windows 95 or Windows 98, then you should use NTFS for Windows 98 (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware...ntfswin98.shtml) rather than NTFSDOS. Full read/write access to NTFS drives from DOS is available with NTFSDOS Professional Edition. If you want to salvage files off a corrupt NTFS volume or repair an NTFS boot sector or partition table, see Winternals' Disk Commander. - http://www.winternals.com/

NTFSDOS.EXE is a read-only network file system driver for DOS/Windows that is able to recognize and mount NTFS drives for transparent access. It makes NTFS drives appear indistinguishable from standard FAT drives, providing the ability to navigate, view and execute programs on them from DOS or from Windows, including from the Windows 3.1 File Manager and Windows 95 Explorer.'

[Kibler]

As far as I know winxp doesnt have a floppy disk boot option. The 4 boot disks for Windows 2000 will not work on XP.

If some one ever figures out how to make a floppy boot option for XP please tell me lol....

Kibler

[xibit]

well i have: Windows.XP.Pro-Boot.Floppies it makes 5 floppies to XP

[Tesseract]

These boot floppies are probably from Beta 2 and still contains "Whistler" in the boot process.

If they are the final boot floppies, then please send them to me.