Always wanted to know how to get in DOS, before windows xp is started up?
Here a short list:
Go to www.bootdisk.com, and download the files you need.
Copy paste them on an empty disk, and ready is your DOS boot disk

Now you have one thing to do, before it works,
When your computer is booting, press del, when it says "press del to enter setup" or something like that.
Now find the "boot sequence", and put with page up/page down A: first in line.
Now it boots from your disk straight to DOS.
This is also very usefull, when you **** up windows xp, this way you can rewrite files, to make it working again

Mark

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Dec 21 2005, 03:02 PM

Wait, if the system use NTFS file system. How can DOS read and recover files. I remember that DOS can't read NTFS. Right?

Copying files to the disk make it a DOS boot disk? I don't think so, how about the boot-sector. We need a program to write to BootSector, Windows Explorer can't do that.

There are a couple of free DOS alternatives in the world, it you'd really need them.

I would discourage people, though, to download bootable stuff from sites that are obviously not officially authorized by the original copyright holder to re-distribute such binaries.

I once did it some while ago, with a program that uses those files to make that disk. And it works perfectly, on all the pc´s i´ve used it on, i could just read and delete anything i wanted.

You are right, there is a small error in the topic. The complete way you have to do that is like this :
1) You download the file from bootdisk.com.
2) You unzip the file on your computer.
3) You see a little .exe program, which asks you to insert your floppy disk, and writes the "real" image file you downloaded. this is a bootable image file, so you PC will be able to boot from it.
I am stilll working this way for tens of years. Of course, you will have a ms-dos systom booted. So, if you want to read things from, or write things to your hard disk, this disk must have been formatted in FAT32 mode, not NTFS. that's why I always have some FAT32 partitions on my hard disks, so I can boot under DOS in order to write things to my hard disk.
for instance, if you have a Norton Ghost backup on your hard disk, you boot on a floppy, and then you restore your crashed system from the backup un the hard disk.

ghost comes with its own boot disk but atm im very angry with them , a client wanted a reliable back up sytem so we got ghost 2003 but coz she is using a stupid acer F3 (has Uli (ALI) chipset) ghost cant use her sata driveso i spent all yesterday muckign around and ****

another way to dos is to use xp recobery then just go C:/ and then u should be in dos ( never had to do this i see no point)