I recently said that an MS-DOS boot disk couldn't be created in Windows 2000. As several readers pointed out, this isn't quite true. An MS-DOS boot disk can be created using files located on the Windows 2000 Professional CD. 

Insert the Windows 2000 Professional CD. Open a command prompt and switch to the CD by typing in the drive letter and pressing Enter. Type:

\Valueadd\3rdparty\Ca_Antiv

Press Enter. Now insert a disk into Drive A and then type:

makedisk

Press Enter. After the disk is created, you can delete the unnecessary files from the floppy.

We decided to use Windows Explorer to copy the files in \Valueadd\3rdparty\Ca_Antiv to a new folder on Drive C (Boot_disk). Then we created a new batch file to generate the boot disk and automatically delete the unnecessary non-system files.

To create the batch file, run Notepad and enter the following:

@echo off
fd144 a: avboot cls attrib a:*.* -r >null del a:autoexec.bat del a:avboot.exe del a:choice.com del a:more.com del a:virboot.dat del a:*.txt exit

Choose File, Save As, and name the file bootdisk.cmd. Save bootdisk.cmd in the Drive C folder that contains the contents of \Valueadd\3rdparty\Ca_Antiv.

To create a boot floppy, insert a disk into Drive A and double-click bootdisk.cmd. If you need to create a boot disk very often, then you can place a bootdisk.cmd shortcut on your desktop or in the Quick Launch toolbar.

Windows XP Professional will create an MS-DOS boot disk. Just right- click Drive A in My Computer and choose Format. When the Format dialog box opens, select the 'Create an MS-DOS startup disk' check box and click Start.