accessing the window dir in dos

[Marklb]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this but I wasn't sure where this fell under. I'm wanting to know if I had a bad boot sector and wasn't able to boot into windows and there is documents on c: that I want to copy onto a floppy so if I have to re-install windows I would not lose the docs. how would I go about doing this or is there a program I could get that would do this. If I just use a boot disk and type in dir none of the dir. comes up

[Byte 2.0]

Please include what verion of windows you have.
in dos I think u are looking forthe My Documents folder right? c:\Mydoc1~1 or something weird like that. I can't remember how it is in dos. I am sure someone will beable to check before i get home to my computer.

[Tuf]

What version of windows? If not FAT what file system is on the drive?

[reboot]

Under the 8.3 naming scheme in DOS (8 characters, a dot, then three characters), any folder or filename longer than that will be truncated.
The syntax is as follows for example:
My Documents, becomes mydocu~1, Program Files becomes progra~1 etc.
Filenames retain the same extention, and the first 6 letters, followed by a ~1 something like this:
myfavouritepicture.jpg would be myfavo~1.jpg
If you have more than one like this:
myfavouritepicture.jpg
myfavouritepictureaswell.jpg
myfavouritepicturealso.jpg
they become:
myfavo~1.jpg
myfavo~2.jpg
myfavo~3.jpg respectively.