How Does Windows XP 'ntldr' Work?

[CaptainRon 0]

Microsoft does real strange stuff at times. Have you tried making a Windows bootable floppy?All you need to do is format the floppy from windows xp and copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini files onto the floppy!!!The next time you can just boot from the floppy.Well the question is, ofcourse the smart ones would have already got, how does just simply copying three files onto a floppy make the floppy bootable? (Since to be able to boot, the first 512 bytes of the floppy shall be written to) You couldn't do the similar thing with Windows 98 disks. Has anyone done something similar with Linux???

[wutske 0]

Sounds impossible. Have you done this by just copying the files to the fdd or did you do a format wich would copy the system files to it ?
Linux can also make bootdisks, dunno how tough.
I do know how the get the bootsector to a file (I use this to boot linux via the windows boot loader).
it's as simple as

dd if=/dev/sda3 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.bin

wich would simply extract the bootsector from the 3th partition on my SATA disk.

[abhishek 0]

This is simple. When you simply format(not quick format) the floppy drive it actually writes the entire boot sector to the floppy i.e. it writes the entire 512 bytes including the 480bytes(from 30-509) of bootstrap code. This is how when you simply copy the required files to floppy it becomes bootable. You can notice this if you have an unformatted floppy in the drive and when you start you computer it wont boot(This is only when the BIOS options is set to boot from floppy first)

[iGuest 3]

work of all nt based system fileHow Does Windows XP 'ntldr' Work?

 work of all nt based system file whit example

• boot.Ini

• NTLDR

• BOOTSECT.DOC

• NT ditact.Com

• NTboot.Sys

-question by MUKESH