Creating a boot disk

[Steve]

I am replacing my hard drive on my Dell desktop computer.
My computer originally came with Windows ME and then I
upgraded to XP. Does the recovery disk that came with the
computer double as a boot disk? If not then what kind of
boot disk do I need to create and how do I do that?

 

[purplehaz]

A recovery cd is bootable, but only to install/recover the os thats on it.
So a ME recovery cd would install me again. Also a recovery cd does not work
as qualifing media to use the xp upgrade version, so you will most likely
need the full xp version if you ever wanted to do clean installs.(one of the
downfalls of buying oem)
To install xp, boot to the xp cd(its bootable) and follow the on screen
instructions.

 

[Peter Hutchison]

I am replacing my hard drive on my Dell desktop computer.
My computer originally came with Windows ME and then I
upgraded to XP. Does the recovery disk that came with the
computer double as a boot disk? If not then what kind of
boot disk do I need to create and how do I do that?

Depends on the recovery disk, if you need to reinstall XP
then in most cases you can boot off the Recovery CD to reinstall XP.
(BTW, recovery CDs will delete everything on your HD before installing
XP).
It is possible to create a MS DOS boot disk via My Computer, right
click A: drive and select Format and select option to create a dos
boot disk (but will not provide CDROM drivers though), you need
OAKCDROM.SYS and MSCDEX.EXE for that (from a 98/Me disk).

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/