>>I must do this in a Dos environment but NT
will not allow me to boot to DOS. So I would use the NT DOS box
for this procedure which requires a separate DOS OS installed though
not bootable.
Um, well, close. NT will allow you to boot to DOS (or Win 95/98)
with its limited dual-boot facility, but you have to installed
the other environment separately (also first, unless you're
prepared to juggle boot sectors after the fact, using some of
those Resource Kit utilities <g>). The NT DOS prompt is not
the real DOS environment, despite its similarity.
To make matters more complicated, you can boot (real) DOS from a
floppy, provided you've built DOS so you can build the floppy.
You can build a floppy which contains enough of DOS to run
self-contained and do most of the really essential things
for which you need the DOS environment, including flashing
bios, recovering boot sectors, etc.
As an alternative to DOS itself, you can also build a
bootable DOS floppy in Win 95/98, which
floppy would boot to the Win 95/98 version of DOS.
BTW, just for reference the last DOS version released was
6.22; the Win 95 version is 7.0. I don't know if 98 is
7.0 or something higher.
You can NOT build such a bootable DOS floppy with NT; at least
not with standard utilities. NT lacks both the DOS components
to put on the floppy and the ability to write a DOS boot
sector.
In any case, once you have a bootable DOS floppy, you can
always boot DOS from there, even if you don't have (still have)
DOS on a hard disk. Of course if you trash it or lose it
your outta luck. I personaly always keep a bootable DOS
on my hard drive.
Once you've booted DOS from floppy or hard drive, you can
then run real DOS aps - flash bios, do low-level diagnostics,
etc. If you have NTFSDOS installed (yes, you can put it on
a floppy-based DOS), you can access NTFS files (read only).
I say again, you can BOOT DOS from NT, or rather, during the
NT boot up you can choose to boot another OS besides NT,
which can be DOS. This part of the boot up almost always
works even if NT is generally trashed. BUT you have to
supply the other OS from another source.
Another day we'll talk about the mechanism for this if anybody
wants to hear it again.
I should also mention (before Sean gets me <g>) that you can
use a boot manager to pick from any of several OSs at boot up.
NT is not a boot manager, but it does have a limited dual-boot
capability (it can boot any number of NT installs plus one
other operating system).
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