re: It's a message FROM the floppy Friday, May 3, 2002 at 2:40 pm Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum Posted by BCS (48 messages posted) That was TOTALLY the answer!!! I formatted 3 disks: One on Win 98, one on NT and one on Win 2000. Both the NT and the 2000 disks gave the NTLDR error message!!! You are so cool! :-) This leads me to the two questions, one simple and one not so simple: 1. What would WinXP do???? (the simple one) 2. What about brand new disks? What version of format are they using? Is there an "industry standard," and if so what is it? Thanks for solving a problem that has plagued me for a year now!!! On Friday, May 3, 2002 at 1:20 pm, Moe wrote: >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! ". > Written in response to: It's a message FROM the floppy (Moe: Friday, May 3, 2002 at 1:20 pm) There are presently no replies to this message. All messages in this thread [show all] NTLDR missing error...on a Win98 Station! (BCS: Fri, May 3, 2002, 9:37 am) re: NTLDR missing error...on a Win98 Station! (Brian: Fri, May 3, 2002, 10:53 am) re: NTLDR missing error...on a Win98 Station! (BCS: Fri, May 3, 2002, 11:18 am) re: NTLDR missing error...on a Win98 Station! (Lloyd: Thu, Nov 28, 2002, 4:19 am) It's a message FROM the floppy (Moe: Fri, May 3, 2002, 1:20 pm) re: It's a message FROM the floppy (BCS: Fri, May 3, 2002, 2:40 pm) Reply or follow-up to this message Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum