DOS BOOT - DISK! A Windows XP SURPRISE!
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  Not A Tweak, But A Double XP Surprise!

  Neither Win2K nor WinME has the ability to create a simple, basic, DOS-
based boot floppy (a "startup disk") unless you jump through hoops or
do things in nonstandard ways.

  Without a boot floppy, there's no easy way to start your PC if the hard
drive has trouble or if Windows is hosed so badly you can't get it to
start. Without a boot floppy, there's also no easy way to do low-level
DOS maintenance.

  Because XP is the fusion of Win2K and Win9x/ME, I assumed it would
follow the same "no boot floppy" tack. But instead, I was surprised to
poke around in XP and see that the format option there does indeed
offer a "Create MS-DOS Startup Disk."**

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** In XP - open "My Computer" - Right click on Floppy drive(A:)
insert Blank Floppy - click on Format - then click on -
Create an MS-DOS startup disk, at bottom of next Window.
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  As an experiment, I created a startup disk, and all went smoothly. I
was able to use the disk to boot my PC without any problems. But when it
started up, I got the SECOND surprise. The DOS boot message showed
"Microsoft Windows Millennium." To confirm this, I typed "Ver" to see
what version of DOS was running, and the screen showed: Windows
Millennium [Version 4.90.300] !

  Although it's jarring to see the WinME startup message on an XP-created
floppy, all this means is that Microsoft cribbed a few essential DOS
boot files from WinME, and made it so XP can drop them onto a freshly-
formatted floppy for you. I'm glad they did: It's a very good thing
that Microsoft restored the ability to make a simple boot disk.

  But, ironically, their use of WinME's versions of DOS also shows that
WinME could have had boot-disk ability all along. And the bundling of a
write-to-floppy DOS subsystem in XP also shows that the same kind of
thing could have been done in Win2K, too...