Has Microsoft Changed Procedure For Making Boot Floppies?

[CHANGE USERNAME TO westes]

Has Microsoft changed the procedure for making a Microsoft boot floppy?
Our existing boot floppies created under SP2 work fine, but the ones we try
to create on SP4 machines all fail to work.

The procedure we use is:

1) Format floppy
2) Copy ntldr to root of floppy.
3) Copy ntdetect.com to root of floppy
4) Copy boot.ini to root of floppy

Is there a new procedure required under SP4?

 

[George Hester]

Mmmm...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817006&Product=win2000

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;301680&Product=win2000

 

[me]

not sure if doing that is even possible
i remember trying that with sp6 a few years ago for nt and it didn't work
the only file i could copy or update on the boot disks was atapi.sys on disk
3 so it could recognize drives larger than 8gb but i can see how it wouldn't
work because of conflicting file versions

 

[CHANGE USERNAME TO westes]

It works great, and I use it all the time. The typical application for a
Windows 2000 boot floppy is when the boot sector of a hard drive is either
corrupt or not set as Active.

There is a feature misdesign in Computer Manager for Dynamic drives that
does not let you set a dynamic partition as "Active". I have definitely
had cases where I mirror a disk and then I cannot boot from the mirror.
The boot floppy almost always solves that problem, by putting the boot
sector logic and Windows 2000 bootstrap files onto a floppy drive.

The question I posted was not "how do I ever make a boot floppy work?" The
question I posted is why did it work in earlier versions of Windows 2000 and
(seemingly) stop working in recent Service Pack releases.

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

westes

In what way do they fail?

Does your boot.ini start with scsi() or multi()?

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[CHANGE USERNAME TO westes]

It looks like the newer service packs are creating the boot floppies with
the new "signature()" syntax that is used for automatically finding the
partition on any attached disk. I converted this to absolute references
using multi() and I get the same result. What happens is that the light
comes on the floppy, but no list of boot partitions ever displays. After
some timeout period, the hard drive boots from its default partition, but no
menu ever displays.

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Will

You will need to copy the file ntbootdd.sys to the floppy as well, and keep
the signature syntax. This MS Knowledge Base article has more information:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=227704

Best regards

Bjorn