Can I make a Bootable CD that supports NTFS?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank J. Lhota
  • Start date Start date
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Frank J. Lhota

Recently, I had a virus scare. A DLL that was somehow used by explorer was
infected. Norton prevented the DLL from running, but I had to put up with a
constant stream of pop-ups as NAV would intervene to prevent it from
running. I finally solved the problem by booting from a floppy, so that I
came up in DOS mode. I then renamed the offending DLL and rebooted. This
solved the problem! Windows XP came up OK, and Norton Antivirus had no
problem zapping the offending DLL.

Later, it occurred to me that this approach worked only because my primary
partition is FAT32. If it was a NTFS partition, then I would not be able to
do anything with it from a DOS boot. Most likely, NTFS would not fit on a
floppy, but this made me wonder if a DOS-like operating system with NTFS
support could be written to a bootable floppy. That would be a quite useful
diagnostic tool, and could be used for making repairs such as I just did.

Does anyone know if there is a CD-bootable, CLI operating system that
supports NTFS, and if so, where can I get it?
 
Byte said:
You have one if you have your WindowsXP CD, it is a bootable disk.
All you need to do is boot in Safe Mode and boot from the CD-Rom.
Insert the CD and Voila!
Click to expand...

You can boot in safe mode even without a CD. The question was could you come
up in DOS mode and still have NTFS support. Fortunately, the anwer appears
to be yes.
 
Thanks for your speedy replies. I also found out that there is a
DOS driver for NTFS, available at http://www.sysinternals.com.
Click to expand...

I know that NTFS DOS allows DOS to read NTFS files, did you find
freeware that can write to one?

If so, could you provide the link? There's a lot of stuff on
sysinternals. Thanks!
 
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