Booting is the process of reading data written on special tracks of your primary disk. There's two requirements to be met before booting: the disk must be the primary drive and it must contain the necessary data in the correct location.
Your BIOS probably lets you choose boot order, typically, Floppy first, HD next, and CD last. On power up, your system attempts booting from each in turn until it succeeds.
To get plain vanilla DOS running, format a floppy as bootable, then use it to boot. Then, Windows on your hard drive doesn't load, and cannot cause you grief.
Once booted, at the A:\ prompt, type
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\FORMAT D: /Q
Since you've bypassed much of your initialization process, you'll need to include the full path for the Format command.
Hint: If your system seems to be using D:, be certain you don't destroy anything critical.
Cheers, PW. |
