Boot to command promt without a floppy disk or cd

Hi guys,
I want to make a hard drive boot to command promt without using a floppy disk or a cd, This hard drive has the windows 98SE cabs installed on it and if i can get it to boot to command promt with out any media i can install win98se really quickly and efectivly on many machines.

Cheers

 

Do you mean that you have a freshly formatted disk with only the CABs copied onto it?

If so, you can't boot to anything since there is no OS to boot to!

(or did I miss something?)

 

Yes the disk is freshly formatted with only win98se cabs on it, This can be done as i have done in the past i just cant remeber how the hell i did it. I remeber that i copy a couple of files to the hard drive from a boot floppy.

 

command.com
io.sys
msdos.sys
drvspace.bin

These are the files you want. The drivespace file probably isn't necessary but these are the files that are copied when you format the drive using format /s . Copy them to the drive and it should get you going.

 

Put the floppy into the computer and boot up, and do this command.
sys a: c:
This will make the hard drive bootable, just enough to start windows setup.
PS. I use this command to format and make the drive bootable, and it also names the drive or does the volume label, so that format does it thing and exits without any prompts, except for the warning when it first starts about everything being deleted.
format /u /s /v:system c:

 

Cheers guys.

 

If you are wising to install Win98 SE from the files on the HD it is better to boot to a floppy.

Change to the Folder where the Files are located and run setup from there.

Once the setup has started remove the floppy.

This will allow Windows to set up EVERYTHING from the Boot sector on up.

If the Sys command happens to be different than the one in Windows DOS it may create problems.

Bottom line.

Let Windows setup do it all.

BillyBob

 

i can install win98se really quickly and efectivly on many machines.

I do not follow that at all. All machines would need to have access to the files. Unless you are refering to putting the files on each machine ?

And it would not be good to set up another machine from the files on your one HD. The other machine would have no access to them if they are needed.

Each machine needs it own access to the files either on the HD or from the CD.

BB