Windows XP booting into "DOS?"

[dbminter]

There are some applications, such as Drive Image 5 and 6 and Acronis True Image and Disk Director that cannot directly write to C:\ if it's in use by Windows, which is always, of course. So, they have the ability to restart Windows and instead of starting Windows, they boot into "DOS" (In the case of Acronis, it's Linux, I think.) and run the "DOS" based utility. My question is how.

 

 

By this, I want to be able to find out what is running instead of Windows. I've tried booting off of a floppy after Windows restarts and before it restarts into DOS and checked the usual culprits: AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, IO.SYS, MS-DOS.SYS, and BOOT.INI But, nothing is ever out of the ordinary there to give me a clue as to what is running. Are there other .INI etc. files I can check here to see what will be running after restart? And, anyone know what they are and willing to pass the info along. Thanks!

[spinningwheel]

Sorry buddy, the last time I knew anything about DOS was when I was running Dr DOS 6.0 I think...I guess I just got too lazy with the M$ Windoze and somehow time went on...

[dontasciime]

First off you need to have your operating system on a fat 32 partition

 

Then download this from my ftp Dos

 

 

then unrar and use you know what to burn the iso to a cd

 

 

then pop it in your cd rom on computer you want to install dos to

 

either set your boot order in bios to boot cd rom 1ST, or press f8 to get into boot menu or f11 or f2 or whatever the boot menu key is in your bios/computer etc "choose cd rom or the dvd rom drive you have cd in"

 

It will then boot and take you thru a set of options, DO NOT UPDATE MBR when it asks you

Follow it thru, and CHOOSE DUAL BOOT, none of the other options..It will then ask you lots of other questions, and choose to install the adddons, apart from the chinese one, just follow the prompts till it finishes.

 

Then reboot and choose either XP or DOS.

 

 

you could or should back up your operating system first using GHOST, but i did not , but i did have an image i could have gone back 2 though

 

you will also not have access to ntfs partitions you will have to source out some drivers to use external usb devices as well

Edited September 27, 2005 by dontasciime

[dbminter]

Thanks, but, I don't need to dual boot. I need to figure out how Windows is loading something other than Windows so I can recreate it myself on a bootable CD. Plus, I believe Acronis uses Linux, so, dual booting to DOS won't help much.