Ms Dos>> no floppy drive

[jivrajaman]

Hey, I need to get into ms dos mode, but i dont have a floppy drive in my laptop... i need dos mode without being in windows, so i cant just open command prompt from the start menu, how can i open it before windows loads?
Thanks

[Karnevil9]

Laptops may be different, but I think you hit the F8 key during boot. It should take you to a menu page where you can open in safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, and I believe one of the choices is MS-DOS mode.

[RJ]

Well, since you posted in the WinXP/2000/NT Forum I believe you have one of these OS.

And they are not based on DOS, so they don't have a DOS mode. So you can't get into a DOS mode coz there is none.

What are you trying to do ?

RJ

[pillainp]

You can get a Command Prompt using XP/2K's built in boot menu (F8 at startup).

True DOS would do you no good anyway, as it would not be able to access your NTFS partitions in the first place (assuming you have XP/2K installed to NTFS).

You could try booting off a Win98SE CD. Those are bootable and will end at a DOS prompt asking what you want to do next.

Be warned, the first FAT32 partition DOS sees will be listed as C: drive, and that may not be your actual C drive.

[glc]

The closest you are going to get to DOS on a 2k/XP machine is the emergency repair console.

Why do you need to boot to DOS?

[pillainp]

I believe it has something to with this thread:
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?threadid=97828

I think he wants to try and retrieve the locked files that way (through DOS).

[glc]

Oh.

Password protected profile Hey, I had some major problems with my computer, and i couldnt fix windows xp, so instead of formating, i just reinstalled windows xp into another folder, so I would still have all of my other files. The problem is, that with the original windows installation, the profile with all of my files had a password. Now, for some reason I cannot get into the old my documents, because it says that I don;t have access. I know the password if i need it, but it doesnt even ask for it. How can I get my old files before I reformat? Thanks Aman

You can copy one file at a time using the console prompt. It will not accept wildcards.

I'm going to leave the other thread open and close this one - I don't think "DOS" is the answer to this problem.