Windows® 98 Unleashed

Creating an Emergency Boot Disk

When most computers are switched on, the startup BIOS code first runs the Power-On Self Test and then looks for a disk in drive A. If it finds a disk, the BIOS code checks for a boot sector and, if one is present, boots the system via the floppy to get you to the A:\ prompt. If there's no disk in drive A, the system tries to boot via the active hard disk partition. If your hard disk dies or if Windows 98 refuses to run, you can use a bootable floppy disk to bypass the hard disk and regain control of your system. Windows 98 gives you two methods of creating bootable floppy disks:

• You can use the Format command to either copy the necessary system files to an already formatted disk or format a disk to make it bootable. ...