Watch out for differently formatted diskettes

Posted by Vic Laurie
October 24, 2005

If you have ever tried to use an A: drive diskette formatted in Windows 98/Me to boot into Windows 2000/XP, or vice versa, you will have encountered the fact that the boot sectors of a formatted diskette are not the same for all Windows systems. The boot code of a DOS/Win9x/ME diskette loads and executes the IO.SYS file whereas the boot process of Windows 2000/XP involves the NTLDR file. Many preformatted diskettes have DOS formatting and will not work as a XP startup disk unless reformatted in XP.

More on boot disks here.

Computer management

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