How To Guard Against Boot Failure With a Windows NT Boot Disk

ID: Q101668

The information in this article applies to:
When Windows NT is installed on a computer that has an Intel x86-based processor and the boot record for the active partition or files required to boot Windows NT becomes corrupted, it is not possible to boot Windows NT or any other operating system on that computer.

To guard against this situation, create a Windows NT boot disk when you install Windows NT on the computer. This disk is different from an MS-DOS boot disk because the entire Windows NT operating system cannot fit on one disk as MS-DOS can. A Windows NT boot disk contains the files necessary to start the operating system with the remainder of the Windows NT system files installed on the hard disk drive. Use the following procedure to create this disk.

  1. In File Manager, place a blank floppy disk in drive A and click Format Disk from the Disk menu.


  2. In the root directory of the boot partition of your hard disk drive, use the ATTRIB command to remove the hidden, system, and read-only attributes from the Boot.ini, NTLDR, Bootsect.dos, and Ntdetect.com files.


  3. Copy the four files to the boot disk.


  4. Use the ATTRIB command to restore the hidden, system, and read-only attributes to the files on your hard disk.


  5. If Windows NT is installed on a SCSI drive, perform steps 2 through 4 above to copy the Ntbootdd.sys file to the boot disk as well.


If you format a floppy disk in File Manager, the boot record points to the NTLDR file. When NTLDR runs, it loads the available operating system selections from the Boot.ini file. If the user selects Windows NT, NTLDR runs Ntdetect.com, and then passes control to Osloader.exe. If the user chooses MS-DOS or OS/2, NTLDR loads Bootsect.dos.

Additional query words: prodnt bootdisk boot 


Keywords          : kbusage nthowto NTSrvWkst 
Version           : 3.1 3.5 3.51 4.0
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        :

Last Reviewed: January 13, 1999