Boot disk question?

I want to clean up my hard drive and reinstall Win2000. When I make the boot disks (4 I understand), will this make the CD drive recognized. I have done this with Win98, but I always had the 3.5 disks. Would like to know this before I format my hard drive.

Thanks jeff

 

The Windows 2000 CD is bootable as long as your BIOS supports it (Any machine too old for that will probably not run Windows 2000 anyway).

Just go into BIOS/Advanced Settings and set 1st boot device to CD-ROM

 

You might try making a single boot floppy with "XPBOOT.EXE" found here:

http://www.tech24.com/tools/bootdisks/xpboot.asp

The resulting boot floppy is set up to do all the 'stuff' you might need to manually do to the HD (fdisk, format, wipe, etc) before doing a fresh Win2K or WinXP install. It loads 'smartdrv.exe' (for speed) and one of four universal CD drivers to allow installation of Win from CD without first booting the Win CD. Its kinda a hack but it works.

Have fun
TopDog

 

Hey jfl155, I just recently installed W2K on an old machine that wouldn't boot to the CD-Rom. I created the 4 disks and it loaded the CD-Rom drive just fine. So to answer your question, yes creating the startup disks will allow you install without reading from the CD-Rom drive first.