Why does BOOTPREP only work with a Win98 formatted floppy?

[Nigel Walker]

I was trying to make a floppy with all the utils I wanted. I can only make
BOOTPREP work if the floppy is formatted with Windows 98. If I try
formatting with a different version of DOS (ROMDOS6.22 or XP), BOOTPREP just
hangs at the point where it asks "Are you sure..." I am just using the
command BOOTPREP /dc which works fine with my Win98 formatted floppy.

Nigel.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Nigel,

ROMDOS do you see anywhere Microsoft signatures in there? I think that it
should be something like MS-DOS for bootprep to work.

XP DOS? This one is new and I never heard of it :-(
If you mean on emulated DOS console that you have in Windows XP then this is
not a DOS but just a console with some options that look as DOS, in reality
you can't do any direct disk accesses from there in emulation mode.
bootprep is intended to be used after DOS fdisk and format operations, so
you should already have a dos.
If you format disk from Windows XP it will already have boot sector, but it
might not work always.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Nigel Walker]

Sorry, Slobodan, I meant a floppy formatted under XP. I was just trying to
get my head round what BOOTPREP does and what it relies upon.

Regards,
Nigel.

 

[KM]

Nigel,

Sorry, Slobodan, I meant a floppy formatted under XP. I was just trying to
get my head round what BOOTPREP does and what it relies upon.

How did you fprmat the floppy under XP? What and how did you put the DOS on it?
I never heard of XP DOS either.

If you used the ROMDOS from datalight, it should be MS DOS 6.22 compatible, IIRC. Can you give us more details on this too?
Particulary, what version you used, how you formatted the floppy, how you put the DOS on it?

 

[Nigel Walker]

What I meant was I used the "Create an MSDOS startup disk" option when
formatting a floppy from XPP.

I just wanted to know what BOOTPREP actually did and how it relies on the
booted operating system. Is it always reliable to run BOOTPREP before
copying the XPe image to the disk?

Regards,
Nigel.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Nigel,

Bootprep only replaces first sector on your partition so that it search and
load ntldr. file. That is it.
You need to use bootprep only once after using DOS format. After that you
can copy XPe files as many times as you want to your medium as long as you
don't partition/format your disk.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Nigel,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/xeconBootPrepexe.asp

 

[Nigel Walker]

Thanks

Nigel,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/xeconBootPrepexe.asp