April 06, 2001, 12:00 AM — Several readers have asked about making setup floppy disks for Windows
NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Even if you usually boot from the CD, it's not
a bad idea to keep a set of floppies.
To make a set of floppies in Windows NT 4.0, make sure you have three
blank floppy disks available. Insert the Windows NT 4.0 installation CD
into the CD-ROM drive and click Start and Run. Now type:
drive:\i386\winnt32 /ox
"Drive" represents the CD-ROM drive letter. Now press Enter and NT will
now prompt you to insert the blank floppies to create your NT 4 setup
disks.
If you're not running in Windows NT 4.0 but you need some boot floppies
right away, then boot the computer in MS-DOS, making sure that you have
a DOS driver for the CD-ROM drive (a Windows 98 startup disk will do).
Now, navigate to drive\i386 and type:
winnt /ox
Press Enter and you will be prompted to insert the three floppies.
To create boot floppies for Windows 2000, prepare four blank floppy
disks and insert the Windows 2000 CD-ROM. Click Start and Run. Now type:
drive:\bootdisk\makeboot.bat a:
You'll be prompted to insert the fours disks in sequence.
The procedure for Windows 2000 is the same if you boot to MS-DOS. Just
make sure your boot disk loads a CD-ROM driver.
