It's a message FROM the floppy
Friday, May 3, 2002 at 1:20 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Moe
(15 messages posted)
I assume the floppies are formatted. If so then this applies.
The DOS boot process
is described in detail here
Many people think that when you boot a system from a floppy or hard disk that has
no system files--because it was formatted without transferring them--that the system
doesn't boot. It's worth pointing out that in truth, it does boot;
the boot process just halts very quickly when no operating system files can be found.
In fact, the error message "Non-system disk or disk error - Replace and press any
key when ready", is printed by the volume boot code that is read from the volume
boot sector on the disk.
This means the message displayed is coming from the floppy disk. The message is
written to the disk during the format process and hard coded into the FORMAT.COM
program. You can see the message inside FORMAT.COM by opening it with DEBUG.EXE.
The message then, ofcourse, will depend upon what FORMAT.COM program was used to
format the floppy.
Just for fun, using DEBUG, I changed the message inside of my format.com.
Now when someone tries to boot up with one of my formatted floppies they get:
" Don't look now... but I think there's a floppy in your drive! ".
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 |  | It's a message FROM the floppy (Moe: Fri, May 3, 2002, 1:20 pm) |
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