If you are someone who has worked with computers for a living in the past then you know what a boot disk is. Even if you are just someone who has worked on computers in their spare time and didn’t get paid for it, there is a good chance that you know what a boot disk is as well. So before we go on, let’¯s explain in one line what a boot disk is. It is a disk that has the minimum files that it takes to boot up Windows. After it boots up, it will then let you run several utilities that will try to examineand fix what is wrong with the system. Boot disk used to be very vital for a person’¯s system that was messed up somehow and would refuse to boot up. But these days, there are several other options that you can use besides a boot disk. So the question is, o you need to use a boot disk for Windows 7
The other options
There are other ways that you can get into the computer now if it fails to boot. You can use a Linux live disk that will not only boot into Linux without having to be installed but it will also let you look at your Windows partition. This way you can see if anything is wrong with it. Also, a lot of people these days have their system set up to dual boot. This means that they have more than one operating system on the machine. This way if one operating system fails to boot, you can just go into the other one with no problem. A set up like this is a lot easier than using a boot disk. And even if you still want to use something that is more in line with the traditional boot disk when something goes wrong, you can just set up a Windows recovery disk. This is sort of like a boot disk but is a little bit different. We will not go into the differences now but the Windows recovery disk is the Microsoft preferred way to get into your system if anything goes wrong.
Why boot disk are still around
As you can see, you have many different alternatives that you can use besides the traditional boot disk. But this does not mean that a boot disk is useless. The size of a boot disk and some of the utilities that are available on it makes a third party boot disk very useful. And some boot disks are very easy to use over a network. Using a boot disk over a network can be very handy to your network administrator.
The only difference between the past and now is that a boot disk is not the only game in town if your system decides not to boot up. But the disks are still useful and convenient if you decide to go that route.