Bootable hard drive

[Misterxtreme]

How do i make a hard drive bootable. Boot to command promt i mean.

[sumdumguy]

format c: /s

[Misterxtreme]

That command is no good as the drive is already formated.

[nihil]

Hi,

All HDDs are bootable. What is it you are trying to achieve? Multiple booting?

A few more details would help...............you can even boot an OS from a CD..............?

Cheers

[Misterxtreme]

Ok ill be as clear as i can. I have a hard drive with win98 cabs on it and i want to make the drive boot to command promt without the use of a disk. which files do i have to put on the hard drive to make it boot like a floppy does?

[nihil]

I am probably a bit thick here?

Do you have another OS to boot from?

The CAB files are the OS load compressed files.

If you load an OS to your HDD it will boot from that just like your floppy

REMEMBER:

If you have another Windows OS, then you will have problems, because they don't sleep well together

Cheers

[Misterxtreme]

No i do not have another O/S just cabs files

[DeadAddict]

You might want to try this

Open the file C:\MSDOS.SYS with a text editor, like notepad.
You'll probably have to remove the Read-only, System, and Hidden attributes of the file before editing it.
Find the line that reads BootGUI=1, and change it to BootGUI=0.
Save the file and reboot your computer. Type Win to start Windows.

[SDK]

To copy system file to media, the command is

sys a:

This will turn the A: drive bootable, just change a: to c: for hard drive.

[rcgreen]

Assuming that your drive is formatted FAT32 or FAT16,
you need to get a bootable floppy disk. The best way
is if you have a WIN98 machine available. Go to
Start-->Control Panel-->Add/Remove programs--> Startup Disk.

Boot from the resulting floppy disk and issue the command
SYS C: <enter>
This will make the hard drive bootable to a command prompt.
If you want additional functionality, copy the files (from a WIN98 system)
from C:\windows\command and put them on your hard drive. These are most of the
MSDOS commands.

I don't think it will work if the drive is NTFS formatted. This is not the same as the
command prompt you get in Windows NT, 2000, or XP. It lacks their advanced
features, since they run in the windows OS and have access to networking etc.