Marty, I assume you have Win9X? Reboot and tap the F8 key every half second or so. You should get a menu of boot options. You can choose "command prompt only" or "command prompt safe mode". No need to use a floppy; also, some "non-MS" DOS versions are not fully compatible with windows if you want to do diagnostics or repair. You can configure Win9X to boot directly to DOS each time anyway normally (then type WIN to get to windows). With this you would not have this problem. .
Thanks to all who have written - I am running XP Pro, do have a floppy drive and a CD. Most of the problem I gather may have to do with the file system. I finally got to a command line, and found that the CPU could not see the hard drive, just the floppy I finally got to boot. I'm still sweating... -Marty On Mar 27, 2007, at 3:20 PM, jackoftradez@comcast.net wrote:
Marty,
I assume you have Win9X?
Reboot and tap the F8 key every half second or so. You should get a menu of boot options. You can choose "command prompt only" or "command prompt safe mode".
No need to use a floppy; also, some "non-MS" DOS versions are not fully compatible with windows if you want to do diagnostics or repair.
You can configure Win9X to boot directly to DOS each time anyway normally (then type WIN to get to windows). With this you would not have this problem.
.
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With XP Pro, your hard drive is probably formatted with the NTFS file system, which DOS doesn't recognize. (Well, maybe DR-DOS does, haven't tried it.) Any of the Linux Live distributions can access NTFS drives with no problems. If you can download and burn a CD on another machine, or otherwise get your hands on Knoppix or Kanotix, you can boot from the CD and access your NTFS drive. Then you can check for viruses or worms and repair things on the hard drive. The book "101 Knoppix Hacks" has a couple of chapters on using Knoppix Live CDs to repair Windows systems. The book includes a Knoppix CD. And here's a link to their chapter on doing a virus scan on a Windows system using the Knoppix CD: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/knoppixhks/chapter/hack78.pdf There are some Windows XP Live CDs around, but I don't know what they're capable of. Martin Krikorian wrote:
Thanks to all who have written - I am running XP Pro, do have a floppy drive and a CD. Most of the problem I gather may have to do with the file system. I finally got to a command line, and found that the CPU could not see the hard drive, just the floppy I finally got to boot. I'm still sweating...
-Marty
On Mar 27, 2007, at 3:20 PM, jackoftradez@comcast.net wrote:
Marty,
I assume you have Win9X?
Reboot and tap the F8 key every half second or so. You should get a menu of boot options. You can choose "command prompt only" or "command prompt safe mode".
No need to use a floppy; also, some "non-MS" DOS versions are not fully compatible with windows if you want to do diagnostics or repair.
You can configure Win9X to boot directly to DOS each time anyway normally (then type WIN to get to windows). With this you would not have this problem.
-- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community
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Martin Krikorian