NT does not have boot disk capability in the MS-DOS sense. NT is too large. But
you can create an NT boot diskette that will reboot the system and transfer
control to the NT installation on the hd. The “NT boot” disk is invaluable if
your NT workstation or server fails to boot because of a missing or corrupt
system partition or system file.
- Format a floppy diskette on an NT system. NT creates the Partition Boot
Sector with code to bootstrap NTLDR. If you formatted with DOS or Win9x, the
Partition Boot Sector would have a bootstrap progam to load the boot sector for
DOS or Win9x.
- Copy the following hidden, system files from the system partition of the NT
box to the boot disk:
- NTLDR
- NTDETECT.COM
- BOOT.INI (copied from your working NT, it will point to the existing
installation)
- NTBOOTDD.SYS – only needed if the computer has a SCSI controller with its
BIOS disabled
- BOOTSECT.DOS – present only if the computer is dual boot
- NTLDR
with an installed and configured Windows NT which you used to create the floppy.
The boot disk is kinda generic but in particular, the boot.ini must be edited to
point to the correct boot partition. The boot disk is just smart enough to look
for the existing NT installation and pass control to its NT kernel.
See the Registry
Construction Steps .
An interesting resource to download boot disks for a wide variety of systems:
bootdisk.com
