Windows XP startup

[Bob2c]

I want to start a hard drive with XP on it from the Floppy disk. What is the command you type at the a:\ prompt?

 

[stduc]

As far as I am aware this is not possible. XP can't be booted from a floppy. XP does not run on top of DOS like 95/98/Me etc.

 

[wolluf]

stduc is correct - but perhaps you've just not explained what you are trying to do very clearly? (you can't 'start' win9x/ME from a floppy either..).

Why do you want to do this? Have you a problem? Are you really interested in recovery console? Or is your XP not booting - and you want another way of booting it? (you can boot an XP installation from a floppy - but not from a command/dos prompt. You need to copy the 3 files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from the root of the system drive to a blank formatted floppy. If you haven't got access to these files on the drive you want to boot, ntldr and ntdetect.com are on the XP install CD (in \i386) and you can create a boot.ini in notepad or other text editor. For single drive, single partition it should look like this:-

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin

(this is for XP Pro, SP2 - the /noexecute=optin swithc was added with SP2).