Hi,

I know mkdosfs from the dosfstools package can create a DOS floppy disk image, however, my experience with DOS was back in stone age when you use

sys A:

to make it boot-able. Now with Win NT/XP etc, I hear that merely copying ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini into it will make it boot-able. Anybody know if it is true?

PS. From man mkdosfs

Moved to General (Not a Linux question)

What do you want to do? The title of the thread refers to DOS but the body of the message refers to NT/XP etc.

Copying ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini alone would not be enough; the BIOS boot mechanism has to lead to NTLDR being loaded into memory and run. The Windows way of doing it is that the BIOS loads the MBR from the first bootable HDD which finds the active partition table and loads the contents of the active partition's boot sector which loads NTLDR. Wikipedia's Windows NT startup process page has more detail.

There are variants on the above Microsoft route to running NTLDR such as GRUB and LILO, commonly used on Linux-based systems.

Hello! The OP wants to create a DOS floppy disk using dosfstools, which is an Ubuntu/Debian package. The answer is no. Dosfstools merely installs tools used to create writable DOS filesystems. It is not meant to create bootable disks. You have to mount it under Windows and copy those files to it. Either that, or you may have to format it under Windows and check the "Create a MS-DOS startup disk" checkbox when you format.

Yes, please move it back. The gist of the question is to seek the possibility (and solution) to create a bootable DOS floppy disk image using Linux tools.

@smeezekitty, thanks but no thanks, I don't need freedos, I need the bootable floppy disk image to boot Windows XP.

Please note there is a big difference between windows xp and dos.

Try:
http://www.linuxinsight.com/how-to-f...ppy-drive.html
http://linux-sxs.org/hardware/flash_boot_cd.html

Thanks for pointing out. I wasn't know that in OP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

I've found the workaround, I'll blog about it later on.