David Jonathan Justman wrote:

> This sounds useful.  How does one make such a disk, which will be
> ready to use if even the CDROM driver and whatever registry entries
> it uses are damaged, so that one can't even get to the Windows CD?

I have seen a few ways on how to accomplish this. None worked for me by
itself, I combined bits from one with pieces from another to get a disk
that works on my machine. There is probably an easier/quicker way to
accomplish this, but here is how I did it.
Go to Start>System Tools>Make System Disk follow the instructions after
highliting "Windows Start-up Disk".Then find your Dosstart.bat file and
copy it to the floppy. Right click>Edit then look for a line that has
"mscdex.exe" in it. Delete everything up to the word mscdex.exe and
everything after that line (mine looks like this> MSCDEX.EXE /D:IDECD001
/M:12 /L:E). Rename this file a:autoexec.bat (EXACTLY!). Now find your
mscdex.exe file and copy it to the floppy. As I understand it, this
loads DOS CD-ROM drivers.
Find your config.sys file. Copy to the floppy, right click "Edit" or
"Open" (use notepad). Find the line that says DEVICE= that has the
letters CD in it or perhaps the name of you CD manufacturer. If it has
rem at the beginning of the line, delete rem. Delete c:\ from the line
also. Save as a:config.sys (mine looks like this DEVICEHIGH=CPQIDECD.SYS
/D:IDECD001). As a note, in my a:autoexec.bat and a:config.sys files
there is only those two lines. Now notice the word CPQIDECD.SYS, find
that file and copy it to the floppy. Yours probably won't be named that
so you'll have to find yours.
Try it out. Insert floppy, boot system, put a cd in the drive. At the A>
prompt type dir e: (or whatever drive your cd is) then Enter. If you see
the files on the CD, you've got it right, if not you'll have to play
with it like I did..Good Luck!

Back to my original question, typing win at the C> prompt will NOT open
Windows (I tried that first).

Cheers,
Kelly