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Boot disks

A

amdguy12389

Member
Is there anyway you can harm a computer by using a boot disk not made for that OS? I know it way not always work, but can any pernament damage be done by using the wrong boot disk? The reason i ask is because im taking a course at my local technical school and this was the question:

True or false.
It is always safe to use a bootable disk from one OS to access an ailing PC running another OS?

I answered true and got it wrong, but to my knowledge the once the boot disk is removed the system should boot as it would without the disk.

Any imput is appreciated.
 
False would be correct, mainly because a bootdisk could technically do anything. You could boot the disk and have it wipe the drive before you realized what happened or if the disk had a virus on it (not very common these days) it could infect the machine without you knowing it.

And if you want to include bootable CDs then even more is possible and potentially bad. For instance, MS likes to change things around in their OS to make things hard on people like with NT SP4 they changed some of the NTFS on-disk structures just a little bit, if you boot from a CD with SP4 or higher it will automatically update any filesystems on the machine so if the machine is running an older rev it won't boot anymore. There was a similar thing with Win2K (SP2 IIRC) and XP, but I don't think they were quite as problematic.

Essentially any time you boot the machine from external media you run the risk of changing something on the machine.
 
If you were specifically limited to boot disks you can make with format.com/sys.com in Windows, then yes I'd say you were right because they don't do anything once they're booted. Now there's no guarantee it'll work though, if you make the boot disk in Win95 and the filesystem on the machine is FAT32 or NTFS it won't be readable by the bootdisk, but nothing bad will happen.
 
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