My wife's win98 computer quit after a power bump. BIOS works but it won't boot up. Can't find the original emergency boot up floppy I used to have, so I tried several of the free online sources. They are all formatted as .exe files and every time I try to get the file on to a floppy (within my XP puter) I get a message such as cannot acceed floppy. Is there another way I can obtain a copy of the start up files? I figure the XP machine sees a mismatch working with win98 system files. Thanks for your valuable help. --bill

Really shouldn't be that type of problem. A Win98 bootdisk should be an image file that writes the system files to the floppy (usually through a command prompt). Micron used to have the better ones, but their site appears to have fallen off into the bit bucket. 2nd choice: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Maybe it was 'cannot access floppy'? Format the floppy disk first before you run the extraction program.

You figure wrong, it's not a mismatch between XP and 98 at all. XP uses ME for it's boot disks and even that is not the real problem. The problem is that Windows doesn't do DOS disks worth a hoot. You can buy a box of new, formatted floppy disks and have maybe two work for you for a while. But if you take the same box of floppy disks and boot to true DOS mode using 98 for example and formatted those floppy disks in DOS mode they would all work until Windows wrote to them for about the third time, then they start to blow chunks and become unreadable and un-formattable in Windows all over again. If you stick with DOS and access them only that way, they are good as gold for a long, long time. To fix your situation you need to have a floppy disk that was just formatted by any 9x system booted to DOS. A DOS box running in Windows is still using Windows drivers (hsflop.pdr, ios.vxd) and they fail in short order for some unknown reason. Then your downloaded .exe would be able to expaned onto the floppy with some resonable success. Until you have a good floppy disk, you can't get there from here. If you have an OEM 98 CD then the CD is bootable. And along these lines you might find some ISOs out there that can boot 9x for you too. Use your XP box to burn them of course. Lee

I've been swapping Floppys back & forth from my XP PRO Desk top & Latop to my Win98 machines for a long time with no real problems. In making a boot disk you need to run the Format as "Create an MS Dos Startup Disk". Bottom of the Format Screen. I'm not sure this will work if your XP is NTFS. Mine are all Fat32. I just made one to test it & it works fine. There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

It doesn't matter if your XP drives are FAT32 or NTFS, the floppy disk will be created with a FAT12 partition.

This is not an XP issue. It appears that you're not going about creating the boot floppy correctly. The file you download from bootdisk.com is used to create a boot disk. Download it, double click on it & follow the instructions...do not copy the .exe file directly to the floppy.