Well, my floppy drive died a while ago and i was looking for a way to use a boot disk on a zip disk. I tried microsofts boot disk utility for XP but it didn't work for a ZIP Disk as i needed 6 floppys. Is there any other way i can get around this as i needed to flash my motherboard bios

Simple, just format a Floppy Disk with the Option " Create an MS-Dos Startup Disk" in Explorer.

Frist copy your Bios image and Flash program to another disk.

Doh!, did he not say his floppy disk drive DIED!

look around http://www.firmware-flash.com for some boot disks. they have them, and instructions on making them. I'm just too lazy right now to go track them down.

hey, try going to http://bootdisk.com/original.htm
it has links to ms where you can download it. I havent tried it myself but i heard good stories.

"System Requirements
Any x86 compatible system that meets the requirements for installing Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
Operating System - Windows 95 & 98, NT 4.0 & 2000, Windows Me, Win XP"
It doesnt look like it will unzip to a floppy, just to another folder.


good luck

Can't you set your boot devices in BIOS?

Thanks for the links. kane2g for the boot disks to work from that site you have to have a floppy drive or else it just says you dont have 1.44MB floppy inserted into your drive. Anyway i thought microsoft were doing away with floppy disks, they could at least let you use it with a ZIP Disk


Rico i can set my bios to boot from zip but its the part where i need to get the files on it to boot. Anyway i might just go pick up a new floppy drive, they are dirt cheap anyway hehe

In the mean time i will keep looking incase i get anything

A long time ago during the days of (Symantec Norton Utilities 2001) came an application called Norton RecueDisk. Although this application is still part of the Symantec Norton Timidities/SystemWorks bundles it lacks a very important feature called "Norton ZIP Rescue". Norton ZIP Rescue used to put a recovery copy of Windows into a single ZIP disk, you would use it to boot your PC into the Windows GUI and run applications and work (almost) like you would from your hard drive.
Since 2002 this option is not available anymore. As far as I remember Symantec say this is because:

(1) Microsoft System Restore is good enough.
(2) Newer versions of Windows are more stable and less likely to become corrupted
(3) Microsoft has included other recovery options in their OS (Maybe they are referring to the recovery console)
(4) Many people now have the USB/SCSI versions of the ZIP drive and those are not recognized as a floppy drive from the BIOS
(5) Now, it is hard to put a recovery set into a single ZIP disk because of the size/complication of the new OS.

Personally I don't like this, I wish Symantec would consider making this good old feature alive again. Meanwhile if anyone know a way to put a copy of Windows XP Professional into a ZIP disk please let me know.

Thanks.