• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Whats a Boot Disk Used For?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
Back before WinXP you had to use a disk to boot from to install windows. Most computers in that time weren't able to boot from the CDrom. The bootdisks were usually on a floppy drive which was able to boot the computer from. Now, machines can boot from a CDrom drive as easily as from a floppy.
 
Any number of things...
1. Flash your MB's BIOS
2. Flash your video card's BIOS
3. Install SCSI/RAID drivers during W2K/XP Setup
4. Rewrite the Master Boot Record (MBR), using the fdisk /mbr command
5. Access data and run DOS commands on FAT16/FAT32 volumes
6. Run the FDISK tool to partition a HDD(s)
7. Run the FORMAT tool to format a volume/partition...etc.
 
A new computer is essentially blank.. no operating system, nothing. You start it up and you can't do anything. In order to do anything, you need an Operating System. In the old days, before harddrives, floppy disks had entire operating systems on them, and were inserted when the computer was staring up, and when it went looking for an Operating System to start, it would boot off the boot disk, and you would have a working OS.

Fast forward to today.. you can use floppy disks to boot into OS installs, or if you need to boot outside of the OS to do a task, like flashing BIOS, or recover the OS. However, bootable CDs have become much more popular for most things, in fact, Macs haven't been shipping with floppy drives for the last few years.
 
Back