Boot Floppy "CDs"
Quick Start:- It is becoming more and more commonplace for PCs to ship without a floppy drive. Occasionally utilities, such as DOS utilities, need to be available or have their own specific uses on such computers. We have shown how to make such floppies into CDs yourself on our DIY Bootable CDs page but we are also providing a few specific floppies (as their ISO equivalents) on this page for those without access to a bootable USB floppy drive, which can sometimes be another effective approach with PCs that support this in their BIOS setup.
The boot floppies ("start-up diskettes") referenced on this page have been converted into ISO files. These can be simply downloaded and then be used to create an "equivalent" bootable CD. The resulting CDs should function almost the same as the floppies that they were created-from except that they will be Read Only (even if they are CDRW disks). Thus any application that needs to write to these emulated floppies as CDs will fail. In such circumstances it may be possible to copy the program and any associated files to a FAT volume on the hard drive or a ramdrive in order to allow it to function properly. Even this will be problematic if the program needs to actually write, specifically, to an A: drive.
Just download the relvant ISO and burn it to CDR or CDRW. Read the "Important Notes" on the right if you are having problems in creating your bootable CD.
IMPORTANT NOTES
(a) Burning an ISO (or other CD image file):
It is NOT SUFFICIENT to simply copy the .iso file to a CD as a single data file. Such files are archives of other files and must be unpacked and burned by appropriate software as an integrated manouevre.
An .iso (or .bin or .cue or .nrg) or other image file is a complete image of a CD and the correct settings must be used within the burning software to copy/burn the files inside that image to your own CD.
If you have a CD/DVD burner and no appropriate retail software (such as Ahead's Nero or Roxio's EasyCd) or just want a simple iso-burner then try using the freeware application BurnCDCC (60K) or ImgBurn (813K).
(b) Direct Booting:
Bootable CDs do not always boot. This is addressed on our Booting Bootable CDs page.
(c) Indirect Booting:
When CD's wont boot directly it may be possible to initiate the process from a Boot Manager on another medium. Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is particularly useful in this regard and other boot managers such as XOSL and BootIt-NG can also be successful.
Contents
Windows 98se Startup Diskette
Standard DOS boot diskette used, in particular, for preparing a partition prior to a windows installation.
Download Win98se ISO (1.75 MB / MD5=18cb94b1eadaf6e72445bfd94d853458) or its underlying Floppy Image file (1.4 MB) or a self-extracting exe (816 kB) to create your own floppy diskette.
Fig 1. Contents of Windows 98se Startup Diskette.
QuickBoot Windows XP Diskette
This utility can regularly start-up a Windows XP (or other NT-based) system that fails to boot normally from the hard drive or at least help with troubleshooting the cause. Typically there may have been a "NTLDR is missing ..." type of message, a blank screen with a flashing cursor or other BIOS related message.
Booting to this utility should present one with 8 combinations of a hard drive and a partition and as long as Windows XP (the same applies to Windows 2003 and Windows 2000) had been installed into a WINDOWS directory (and not into a WINNT or other named directory) the likelihood is that the first, default, option will be the correct choice.
If there are more than 2 hard drives or more than four partitions on either drive or if Windows is in a different directory, then the ISO might well need disassembling and a new boot.ini file configured before replacing it inside a new ISO or floppy. Hard drives with multiple partitions may not be referenced as anticipated and though normally straightforward it can get very complicated because the references are to the partition tables directly and only indirectly to the physical partitions. When the utility works it works because its boot sector and its associated ntldr file are able to "kick things off" before offloading the boot processes to the relevant partition containing the Windows folder.
Download QuickBoot WinXP ISO (1.75 MB / MD5=a56f6d5b6b9f219a7669fd86faa0edf3) or its underlying Floppy Image file (1.4 MB) or a self-extracting exe (175 kB) to create your own floppy diskette.
Fig 2. Contents of QuickBoot Windows XP Diskette.
The text of the included boot.ini file is:-
[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk1 part1" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk1 part2" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk1 part3" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk1 part4" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk2 part1" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk2 part2" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk2 part3" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Windows XP disk2 part4" /fastdetect
Smart Boot Manager
SBM (Smart Boot Manager) is outlined in detail on another page. It is a very useful boot manager normally run from a floppy or from the hard drive's MBR. It will however often function from a floppy emulated CD - though this is not a certainty - and your system must be set up to boot from a CD. If the default settings need changing they will need changing every time the CD is used because any changes made to the configuration will be incapable of being saved to this CD version.
Download SBM ISO (1.50 MB / MD5=67380f40927a5493af35909440a1e106) or its underlying Floppy Image file (1.4 MB) or a self-extracting exe (660 kB) to create your own floppy diskette.
Note: the content of the diskette is proprietary and not normally viewable from Windows Explorer.
The PQ Utilities
These utilities are outlined in detail on our "Read/Edit Hard Drive Details" page. They are extremely valuable if you wanting to extract partition information or to directly edit the partition tables.
Download PQutils ISO (1.80 MB / MD5=08c978b3e56ded4dd3572125961ca1d5) or its underlying Zipped Floppy Image file (749 kB) or a self-extracting exe (777 kB) to create your own floppy diskette.
Note: the content of the diskette is proprietary and not normally viewable from Windows Explorer.
Appendix
MD5 "hash or checksum" values (for those that don't know) are just one type of code that uniquely identifies a file. A single bit changed in a file should result in a different value. They can be valuable in simply identifying a specific file (or checking that no-one has altered it) but in the context of ISO files they can be used to verify that a downloaded file was downloaded without any errors. Thus if there are any problems when burning the ISO to a compact disk one can identify that the problem lies with the burning software/hardware and not with the ISO file itself by checking its hash value with an appropriate program.
There are many such utilities to be found on the web but we mostly use the Toast442.org one. Just set the radio button to Generate Checksums and drag the relvant file onto the application.
