What is a boot disk?

A boot disk will permit you to boot off of a diskette rather than your hard drive. This diskette can be utilized to repair problems that may happen during the lifetime of PC and to help load older MS-DOS games. Remember that this diskette is totally different than a Restore CD or Disc that may have been contained with PC.

Creating a Windows XP boot disk

Windows XP CD is a bootable CD and in many situations you must not want a bootable floppy diskette. Booting from Windows XP CD will permit you to not only install or re-install Windows XP but will also permit you to troubleshoot it.

Create MS-DOS bootable diskette

When formatting a floppy diskette, users have the choice of making a MS-DOS startup disk, for this follows the steps given below.

1. Put diskette in PC.
2. Go to My Computer, right-click A: drive and tick Format.
3. In Format window, check Create an MS-DOS startup disk.
4. Tick Start

Create Windows XP Setup diskettes

Microsoft is starting to phase out bootable floppy diskettes in support of bootable CD discs and has not contained a technique of simply making a bootable floppy diskette in Windows XP or from CD. Though, Microsoft has downloads available for users who still want to make bootable diskettes to install Windows XP.