Is there a way to boot to DOS only in winXP? It doesnt have an option in the shutdown menu. The Dos shell prompt just doesnt cut it... :-?
Windows XP doesn't have DOS. You may be able to instal it, and then you would probably have to use a boot disk to load it.
I had found DOS in WinXP! I forgot, where it was, but it was called something what looked a serious system fixer tool. I think I started it from the installation CD. (I have not got WXP, I fixed my friend's computer when that happened)
But I think You should get DOS somewhere else...
You're thinking of the recovery console, which is not DOS. To boot to DOS, stick a floppy in, right click on your A: drive and choose format, then check "Create MS-DOS startup disk." Restart and leave the disk in the drive.
Of course, if you hard drive is NTFS you won't be able to read it while in DOS...
You need to install dos on your computer before you install windows xp if you want to dual boot. You partition your drive, install one on one then xp on the other.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.asp...-us;306559
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however, if you want to use a boot disk, be sure to install the proper tools so you can have things like EMS, because those are the things windows cannot do. if you use windows to create a disk, it only has command.com, and you can't see any non-fat drives, which windows does by default.
You can't read NTFS drives in any version of DOS without a special utility like NTFSDOS...
Please forgive my ignorance, but what is an NTFS drive? How are they organized if they don't have a FAT?
Sorry, I should have said
NTFS partition (any hard drive can have an NTFS partition). It's a filesystem used by Windows NT/2K/XP. NTFS is generally more reliable and flexible than FATxx.
NTFS uses a master file table (MFT) instead of a file allocation table (FAT).
Thank you Plasma. You are a weath of information, as usual.
Thanks for all your support guys, your info has been assimilated into my data matrix. (ie my brain). It kinda sucks that winXp doesnt come with a bootable dos version, but i guess it was getting a bit too old :wink: