I have WinXP, yet I want to format and sys a hard drive (make it bootable). I was thinking I could get DOS onto a floppy disk and then do the formatting from there. What version of DOS should I get and where should I get it?
Format and "sys" a hard drive with WinXP?
- Thread starter JuanDixon
- Start date
As far as I'm aware there is no way to do this from Windows XP. Even Millenium, if I remember correctly, will refuse to sys a hard drive. Your best bet would probably be to try a DOS clone. Two demo versions I've had success with in the past:
PTS-DOS
ROM-DOS
There is an open source project to create a DOS clone but the last time I used it it was not very compatible.
FreeDOS
PTS-DOS
ROM-DOS
There is an open source project to create a DOS clone but the last time I used it it was not very compatible.
FreeDOS
What exactly does sys do? Is there any way to manually reproduce what it does? Also, I need to get himem.sys and smartdrv.exe onto the new drive, will this be available in a non-MS DOS? Or can I just copy the himem.sys from WinXP (if it has himem.sys)?
sys changes the disks boot record, which is not something I think you can do manually. If you can get a Windows 98 boot disk, that would work. I believe Millenium is where they changed it so you couldn't sys fixed disks.
You can make boot disks in XP, but they use the ME command line, so if what aswedc says is correct, it probably wouldn't do what you want.
- Oct 25, 1999
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Two separate issues.
1. Format, is the process of electronically prepare a drive to receive info (files), in variety of Microsoft's OS.
2. Boot Drive, is a process to make a formatted drive capable to start the OS (usually as drive C: ) when you start the computer.
In win 98 you can you can put an empty Floppy in drive A: then issue the command SYS A: and the floppy will become Bootable.
If you copy to this floppy the Files Format.com, and SYS.com you will get a bootable floppy that can format and make Hard Drives bootable to Win98 DOS.
The core boot loader of Win98 + Format + Sys are occupying less then 1.4 MB so they can fit on one floppy.
Unfortunately this is not the case in WinXP, the Boot loader is very BIG, in order to create a boot drive you need to Boot from the original CD-ROM (you need a Mother Board that can do it), or you can get the core files of Win XP from Microsoft, this core needs 7 floppies.
Windows® XP Home Edition Utility: Setup Disks for floppy boot install.
On other hand if you referring to the capacity to put two hard drives in a computer, one of them has functional WinXP, and the other empty. You cannot make the second drive bootable since there is no SYS command in XP. This is part of Microsoft policy to protect the software.
1. Format, is the process of electronically prepare a drive to receive info (files), in variety of Microsoft's OS.
2. Boot Drive, is a process to make a formatted drive capable to start the OS (usually as drive C: ) when you start the computer.
In win 98 you can you can put an empty Floppy in drive A: then issue the command SYS A: and the floppy will become Bootable.
If you copy to this floppy the Files Format.com, and SYS.com you will get a bootable floppy that can format and make Hard Drives bootable to Win98 DOS.
The core boot loader of Win98 + Format + Sys are occupying less then 1.4 MB so they can fit on one floppy.
Unfortunately this is not the case in WinXP, the Boot loader is very BIG, in order to create a boot drive you need to Boot from the original CD-ROM (you need a Mother Board that can do it), or you can get the core files of Win XP from Microsoft, this core needs 7 floppies.
Windows® XP Home Edition Utility: Setup Disks for floppy boot install.
On other hand if you referring to the capacity to put two hard drives in a computer, one of them has functional WinXP, and the other empty. You cannot make the second drive bootable since there is no SYS command in XP. This is part of Microsoft policy to protect the software.
Juan,
I have XP Pro installed and just formatted a bootable floppy disk. How I did it.
Open Explorer. Select floppy disk drive. Right click on drive in Explorer. A menu pops up. Select Format in the menu. It is bootable to DOS.
When the format floppy disk menu pops up one of the options is to create a bootable floppy disk. After formatting a bootable floppy disk with XP Pro I founnd these files on the floppy: (ONE 1.44 disk)
58,870 EGA2.CPI
58,753 EGA3.CPI
58,870 EGA.CPI
21,607 KEYB.COM
34,566 KEYBOARD.SYS
31,942 KEYBRD2.SYS
31,633 KEYBRD3.SYS
13,014 KEYBRD4.SYS
29,239 MODE.COM
93,040 COMMAND.COM
17,175 DISPLAY.SYS
0 AUTOEXEC.BAT
0 CONFIG.SYS
448,709 bytes
889,344 bytes free
Plus the hidden files are (SHR): MS DOS.SYS and IO.SYS.
You can copy the format.com file onto the floppy as it has plenty of free space on it.
It is located in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
:00 PM 25,600 format.com
1 File(s) 25,600 bytes
I could not find FDISK in Win XP Pro.
I have XP Pro installed and just formatted a bootable floppy disk. How I did it.
Open Explorer. Select floppy disk drive. Right click on drive in Explorer. A menu pops up. Select Format in the menu. It is bootable to DOS.
When the format floppy disk menu pops up one of the options is to create a bootable floppy disk. After formatting a bootable floppy disk with XP Pro I founnd these files on the floppy: (ONE 1.44 disk)
58,870 EGA2.CPI
58,753 EGA3.CPI
58,870 EGA.CPI
21,607 KEYB.COM
34,566 KEYBOARD.SYS
31,942 KEYBRD2.SYS
31,633 KEYBRD3.SYS
13,014 KEYBRD4.SYS
29,239 MODE.COM
93,040 COMMAND.COM
17,175 DISPLAY.SYS
0 AUTOEXEC.BAT
0 CONFIG.SYS
448,709 bytes
889,344 bytes free
Plus the hidden files are (SHR): MS DOS.SYS and IO.SYS.
You can copy the format.com file onto the floppy as it has plenty of free space on it.
It is located in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
:00 PM 25,600 format.com
1 File(s) 25,600 bytes
I could not find FDISK in Win XP Pro.
You can't format and "sys" a hard drive from within XP.
Doing so would require writing to the master boot sector on the drive, writing to the partition boot sector, and laying down boot files. XP won't let you do this through the filesystem. If you're feeling particularly industrious, you could attempt to write these sectors by hand and lay them on the disk with a sector editor such as dskprobe, but I can think of more entertaining ways to waste time.
If you want to make a hard drive bootable, boot the damn machine to a floppy and format/fdisk/whatever off the floppy.
Doing so would require writing to the master boot sector on the drive, writing to the partition boot sector, and laying down boot files. XP won't let you do this through the filesystem. If you're feeling particularly industrious, you could attempt to write these sectors by hand and lay them on the disk with a sector editor such as dskprobe, but I can think of more entertaining ways to waste time.
If you want to make a hard drive bootable, boot the damn machine to a floppy and format/fdisk/whatever off the floppy.
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