DOS Boot disk question, 3.5 floppy

OK, this is not a problem, but put forth for the purposes of discussion and education. I've seen IT professionals make the same mistake, but since it was almost 20 years ago I guess I can excuse myself for forgetting.

I needed to make a boot disk for Win98SE, so I unzipped a file I had made earlier for this occasion. I formated the floppy in XP and unpacked the files onto it. Didn't work. The earlier occasion I had refered to was an IT type formating a 3.5 diskette to give me a free copy of McAfee (company sponsored) and tried to copy the system files after formatting the diskette in Windows. This was in the mid 90's and didn't work either.


I have made system disks using the format:

format a: /u/s

Where /u is unconditional (just format the disk without questions), and /s is system information included. This I know works.


I made a system disk using Win98SE save disk method, and added the necessary extra commands such as format and xcopy32. This works too.


I used XP's copy utility to copy a DOS save disk, the copy worked well also.

So what is the difference?


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I am mediocre at DOS. I have seen people who could actually write programs in it, M/S DOS has conditional statements, and with conditional statements you can write software. I suspect it is becoming a lost art for the most part. Colemanguy showed me a website that is very useful for those in need of a boot disk, I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. It is:

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

I would like to store images of boot disks on my drive and utility CD's I have made over the years, for quick and easy reference.

Thanks guys.

 

I assume the first method (format in XP and unpack the files) didn't work because the Command.com file has to go onto the first sector of the floppy IIRC.

 

Just for the heck of it I tried the

format a: /s/e

on the XP command prompt. Is there a way to make a system diskette in XP?

 

Bill if you mean a bootble floppy then yes. Insert the disk Right click on the A drive under My Computer>Format>Tick the create MS-dos start-up disk option.