China DOS Union

Source: http://www.fixdown.com/article/article/1140.htm

Hearing the floppy drive make noise every time at startup feels awkward; now that problem is solved!

The following is quoted
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1. The problem

　　For computer safety or to speed up system startup, people generally set the BIOS to boot from the hard disk first. But once you run into a situation where you need to use a boot disk to boot the system (such as completely removing viruses under DOS, upgrading the BIOS, etc.), you first have to enter the BIOS and change the settings, and after finishing the job you have to enter the BIOS again to change them back. It's very troublesome. Is there really no way to have both fish and bear's paw? After continuous exploration and testing, a perfect solution was finally found.

　　2. The idea for solving it

　　Friends who have installed a dual-boot Win98 and Win2000/XP system all know that in the root directory of drive C there is a boot manager startup configuration file called boot.ini. In the Operating Systems section of this file there is a line: C\=″Microsoft Windows″. This is a default usage; its complete form is: C\BOOTSECT.DOS=″Microsoft Windows″. Here BOOTSECT.DOS is the Win98 boot sector file, hidden in the root directory of drive C, and the Microsoft Windows inside the quotation marks is the menu item used to boot Win98. The function of this line is: when you select Microsoft Windows from the “boot menu,” the boot manager boots Win98 from the BOOTSECT.DOS file. From the above process of booting Win98 in a dual-operating-system setup, we can draw the following conclusion: if the boot sector of a boot disk is extracted and made into a file stored in the root directory of drive C, and the related line in boot.ini is modified accordingly, then it is possible to boot the system from the boot disk through the “boot menu,” thus avoiding BIOS changes.

　　3. Implementation steps

　　1. Install the Win2000/XP boot manager

　　In Win2000/XP, or in a dual-boot Win98 and Win2000/XP system, the boot manager is already installed. Below is the process of installing the boot manager under Win98.

　　Under Win98, run the installer on the Win2000/XP installation CD, choose “New Installation,” and continue until at startup a boot menu appears with “Microsoft Windows” and “Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Setup.” At this point the Win2000/XP boot manager has been installed. Select “Microsoft Windows” to enter Win98, then delete all files in every hard disk partition whose names begin with $ and end with $.

　2. Make the boot sector file for the boot disk

　　Below is a method of using the DEBUG tool included with Win98/2000/XP to make the boot sector file for a boot disk.

　　First insert the boot disk into the floppy drive, then at the command prompt under Win98/2000/XP type DEBUG and press Enter. Then at DEBUG's prompt "-" enter the following commands in order and press Enter:

-L 100 0 0 1
-RCX
:200
-N C:\FBOOT.DOS
-W
-Q

　　Explanation: the first line reads the boot sector of the boot disk into memory. The second and third lines set the size of the boot sector file to 200B (200B here is hexadecimal, that is 512B in decimal). The fourth line names the boot sector file FBOOT.DOS; readers may name it however they like. The fifth line writes the boot sector data from memory into the FBOOT.DOS file. After the write is completed, the screen will display “write 00200 bytes” the size written to the file is 200B, indicating that the boot sector file has been created successfully. Enter the sixth command Q to exit DEBUG.

　　3. Modify boot.ini

　　Under Win98, modify boot.ini as follows:


timeout=0
default=c:\

C:\=″Microsoft Windows″
C:\FBOOT.DOS=″ the system from the boot disk″

　　Under Win2000/XP, add the following under the section: C:\FBOOT.DOS=″ from the boot disk″, and change the value of timeout to 0.

　　4. Boot the system from the boot disk

　　After completing the above operations, restart the computer. If you need to boot the system from the boot disk at that time, press F8 to enter the “Windows Advanced Options Menu,” choose “Return to OS Choices Menu,” press Enter to enter the “boot menu,” insert the boot disk into the floppy drive, then choose “Boot the system from the boot disk” to boot from the boot disk. If you do not need to boot from the boot disk, no action is needed and your Win98/2000/XP system will boot quickly.

BOOTPART already has this function built in, and with one command it can automatically create the floppy boot sector and automatically modify BOOT.INI. So every time I boot from a floppy now, I do it by selecting “Boot from floppy” from the Win2K startup menu.

Could you introduce bootpart? I'm very interested.
Thanks!!

Using the following command should do it, right:

BOOTPART A: DISKA.DAT "Boot from the floppy disk(A"

Strange... why can't I find the file boot.ini in win 98?? Also, what does boot sector mean??

boot.ini only exists on NT-class systems, right

Right!! But why does the article in the top post say there is a boot.ini in WIN 98?? I don't get it. Was it a typo?!

He was talking about a 9X/NT dual-boot system: “Friends who have installed a dual-boot Win98 and Win2000/XP system all know”

So it was originally talking about a dual-boot system!! sorry, I didn't read it carefully!!

You can use SPFDISK too. Even under a single Win98 system you can add a menu item to boot from drive A:, much more convenient and enjoyable than the above method :）

I use the same method as 禅宗.