🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Mar23.195212.26534@mprgate.mpr.ca> vli@handel.UUCP (Vincent Li) writes:
>When you format a disk for the PC, floppy or hard disk, you can specify
>whether or not the disk is to be bootable or not, right? Now, suppose
>I've formatted the disk to be non-bootable. Is there any way that I can
>make it bootable (a system disk) afterwards without having to
>reinitialize the whole thing (and loose all data that was on the disk)?
>More specifically, I'm interested in doing this to a hard disk.

In order to format a disk to be bootable, use "format /s".  This places
two position-sensitive files (IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM) on the root
directory of the disk.  They are hidden files and therefore they do not
show up on a normal directory listing.  Now, if you forget to format using
the /s option, and start writing to the disk, your files are likely to
take the spot where IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM should go.  If they do,
then you're pretty much out of luck.  You'll probably need to reformat.
If you have the Norton Utilities, Version 4.0 or better, however, you
can use NDD (Norton Disk Doctor) in order to move the offending files to
another location and make the disk bootable.
If you have a blank, formatted disk that you would like to make bootable,
use "sys d:" where d is the appropriate drive.
Since a hard disk is involved, I would recommend that you BACKUP ALL
IMPORTANT DATA before you use programs like NDD.  Although these
programs are fairly reliable, it is best to prepare for the worst.
Hope this helps.

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| Noam Mendelson   ..!agate!ucbvax!web!c60b-1eq | "I haven't lost my mind, |
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