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HOW TO MAKE WINDOWS ME
BOOT AND STARTUP FLOPPY DISKS
last updated: 9/25/00
Why I don't like a Startup Floppy made
the Microsoft Way... When Windows Me makes the Startup Disk it
copies a cab file, EBD.CAB, to the floppy disk. A cab file is compressed
file which can contain more than one file. This one contains 11 files (four
fewer than in the Windows 98 EBD.CAB cab). When the floppy boots
it tries to find a legitimate drive letter for a RAM drive (a RAM drive
is a chunk of memory which is configured to look like a disk drive. It
behaves like a floppy drive or hard disk, except it is faster and disappears
when the computer is turned-off.), makes the RAM drive, and extracts the
files in EBD.CAB to the RAM drive.
The RAM drive procedure is somewhat a kludge,
makes a Startup Floppy that takes a long time to boot, can run into other
problems, is a throw-back to older versions of Windows, and is totally unnecessary
in this version of Windows.. The reason for it, I guess, in the first
place, a wrong one, is the floppy drive will not hold all the files deemed
necessary by it's creator, so they are in a compressed file and extracted
to a temporary drive. I really don't see the need for it. But
even that has changed with Win Me. Four of the files present in the
EBD.CAB and 68 KBytes of DRIVESPACE.BIN in the root directory of the Win
98 Startup floppy are no longer present and there is plenty of available
space. Furthermore, there are several files loaded into the RAM drive that
are duplicated in the root directory of the floppy, and there are tools (e.g.,
debug, chkdsk, and restart) loaded in the RAM drive I doubt the average user
or myself would use. Setting this argument aside, the root directory
has 422KB free and the EBD.CAB file takes-up another 259KB. The RAMdrive
when loaded has 656K of files. If you were to get rid of the EBD.CAB
file in the root directory, all of the remaining files in RAMdrive would
fit in the root directory. I really don't like it, but, with the exception
of assigning the wrong letter to the CD-ROM, the stock Win Me Startup floppy
works most of the time.
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