Booting to DOS

Hi Leah,

There is no easy way to boot to dos before Windows. But there are ways. In your case they all depend on the fact that you need another working computer  and a little bit of internet :)

One way is to make your own bootable usb-thumbdrive ( harder) or an bootable cd ( easier) .

I´m gonna start with the easy way out of this.

To make a bootable cd drive we are gona use a piece of of software called Pe Builder. This software is based on Microsofts own WinPE.

For more information please refere to this link .

Lets start then:

1. Make sure that your system has about 500MB of free disk space!
   
   
2. Download the latest PE Builder version (self-installing package) and install it.
   
   
3. Start PE Builder (pebuilder.exe). When you start PE Builder for the first time it will ask if you agree with the license agreement.
   
   
4. Now PE Builder will ask to search for windows installation files. If you don't have your windows XP setup/installation files on your system you must insert the original Microsoft Windows XP installation/setup CD at this point.
   The files you have at c:\windows are not installation files. They are your already installed files!
   Click "yes" to start searching. PE Builder will now search all fixed- and CD-Rom drives for Windows installation files. This will take some time. When more than one valid location is found, a dialog will appear where you can select which location you want to use.
   
   
5. At the main PE Builder dialog, select the "Burn to CD/DVD" option. When you are using an erasable medium, make sure that the "AutoErase RW" option is enabled. The "burn using" option should be set to "StarBurn". Select your CD writer device from the Device list.
   
   
6. Hit the "build" button. PE Builder will now ask you to create a BartPE directory, answer with "yes".
   
   
7. The license for your Microsoft Windows XP product is shown. Read it and agree to it to continue.
   
   
8. PE Builder will now start building BartPE. This will take a few minutes.
   You will see a lot of files getting copied and/or decompressed, the ISO image build and the data recorded to your CD/DVD writer.
   If the data verify was correct and there where no errors reported you can boot the CD/DVD!
   

That would be it . Insert the cd in your cdrom and reboot. Give it a try... if this is not working.. Write some notes and i will continue my tutorial with the USB Memory Stick.

Good Luck! 

I am assuming you have a floppy drive. If so, you can create a Windows Startup disk from within Windows using a floppy disk. Insert it and enter the BIOS and make sure the system boot order is floppy first, hard drive second boot device. Reboot and the system will boot to the Windows Startup disk. After it boots and you get the A:\ prompt, you can remove the startup disk and insert the floppy with the data you want to copy to your system. You must know the DOS commands to be able to do this. You can then remove the data floppy and insert the Windows Startup floppy, restart the system and remove the Windows Startup floppy before the system boots into it, and you should boot into Windows and then locate the files you copied in the location where you copied them to. Sounds confusing, but actually not. The key is knowing the DOS commands. This may or maynot work, depending on the file system you have. If you have NTFS, you will need a another program to access NTFS files. Hope this helps.

How do I go about making the startup disk?

Press F8 at boot and see if you can get a menu. At that menu you can choose command prompt only. This will only work if you are able to get that far during boot up. Since you stated you have trouble with boot up you may not be able to get that far.

Yeah, I can't get that far in the bootup.  I've tried the command prompt and it doesn't work.