I needed to create a bootable floppy. Ah, simple, I thought. Apparently not.

So how do I do that in Windows 2000 Pro? For something that's a basic essential, I'm finding it pretty difficult to do. Details aren't included in the Windows Help files.

I looked around on the web for relevant advice but nothing worked quite the way it sounded it should.

I tried creating an Emergency Repair Disk via Accessories / System Tools / Backup / Emergency Repair Disk, but when I tried to boot from that I got a DOS message "Ntldr is missing". More internet searching led me to believe that this file should be copied from the C drive root, along with Ntdetect.com and maybe Boot.ini as well. But with those files added, the disk boots up Windows 2000, whereas I only want it to start the machine in DOS so I can update the BIOS.

Hopefully, a Windows 98 bootable floppy, which I will try tonight, will be sufficient to start the machine in DOS, but what if I didn't have one of those ?

How should I do it on a Win 2000 machine ?

Interestingly, ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini are all invisible files on my PC despite my having set the folder options to show hidden files. but until I found a way of tracking them down, I thought they were just missing. So I looked on the web and found that one reason for them to be missing might be out-of-date BIOS ! I nearly threw the PC out the window at that point, since I only needed to create a bootable floppy to enable a BIOS update ! Luckily, reason took precedence over tantrums and I decided my PC wouldn't boot at all if boot.ini was missing or corrupt, so I then figured out that boot.ini at least must be readable using Notepad, so I simply asked Notepad to open c:/ boot.ini (even though I couldn't see it and Search couldn't find it), and there it was.