Backup before experimenting...
I meant everything. Windows has 'must have' stuff spread all over the place and you (I) have no clue just where everything is, so back up the whole disk, because if things go wrong, you'll probably need to restore the whole disk.
Also back up personal stuff. Once you have a 'fresh' system running just fine, you don't want to reload corrupt stuff from the old system: You just want your own data back. (It wouldn't/shouldn't cause problems.)
I'll defer to the Master for the boot disk stuff ...
Message 8051423
NO! A bootalbe floppy contains COMMAND.COM, MSDOS.SYS, and IO.SYS! Anything else was put there to augment the disk's utility. Note: some of these files are hidden.
Formatting a disk is easy. Getting things put in a safe place before formatting is hard. "FORMAT C:" and 20 minutes is all it takes.
Suggestion...
If you're going to have a 'blank disk' on you hands, give some thought to your partition sizes. This is an ideal time to make any alterations. If you had the space, I'd recommend a partition large enough to hold a backup of your system. Next time you have trouble, just restore from that partition. The process will take an hour. You're about to discover that loading from scratch takes much longer.
Note: Windows should fit into 2-3 hundred meg easily. (Compressed!)
Hope this helps, PW.
P.S. For comparison, my whole system, Win98, Office97, development, financial, trading, and personal stuff in a compressed image, is 175 meg. Compressed image of Win98 alone occupies 94 meg. |
