Roger, You can copy those sys files to a floppy ... without even changing their attributes, with certain utilities. BUT it wouldn't work.
System files go on a specific portion of a FDD (just like the MBR goes on a specific portion of your HDD) -- and that portion of the floppy is NOT accessible to a file copy procedure. This is a A Good Thing (tm), since otherwise people might just copy stuff over those hidden by very necessary files. <G> Now, some guru somewhere may know the code that the BIOS must see to access the boot sector of a floppy ... and said same guru might come up with a utility that allows users to copy "anything they want" into the boot sector of a floppy. If that were to happen, I could create a bootable floppy for any DOS I had available on my harddrive, regardless of which version I were running. I could turn on that utility, give it the path to the system files & command.com I wanted to place on floppy, and it could create a bootable DOS 6.22 Floppy on my DOS 5.0 system. It should be a rather simple utility to design, and should be rather small. It would certainly be marketable in "less than rich" portions of this world where 286 isn't a dirty word. The question is, would the appreciation of "the unwashed masses" be enough recompense for the techie who comes up with the utility ... cuz s/he ain't gonna get rich with it. One further aspect of such a utility: It would really REALLY piss M$ off, the idea that someone running one DOS could create a boot diskette for another DOS, or even create it from the CLI of dozerwarez!! }:> ==== On Tue, 4 Jun 2002 10:44:17 -0400 (EDT), Thomas Mueller wrote: >> Am I wrong in my understanding of DOS that the files needed to create a boot >> disk (MSDOS\PCDOS, IO.SYS/IBMIO.SYS, COMMAND.COM) are *always* files on the >> DOS disk, but, except for COMMAND.COM, are hidden/system files? Could you >> not create a boot disk by copying these files (removing the hidden/system >> attributes first) to the root directory of a particular logical drive on your >> HD, going to that root directory, and doing a SYS a:? >> Roger Turk >> Tucson, Arizona > What is the purpose of the intermediate step of copying the hidden/system files > to the root directory of a logical drive? You can do SYS a: from C: assuming > C: is your boot drive. But you can only make a boot diskette for the same DOS > version you booted, not for any other DOS version. -- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
