PCTech Forums

i need to duel boot xp and win 98 se so i need a command promt in dos and not in windows
i can only get the promt in windows and in safe mode but i need to get it when i boot how can i do this

if you have a dual boot system already (where you can choose one or the other (win98 or winXP at boot time)) then this would be easy. Simply choose win98 at boot time, and hit F8 directly after you choose the WIN98. You should get a menu that you can choose to boot normally, safe mode, command prompt, etc. Just choose command prompt.

If you had win98 and installed XP over it, you likely overwrote the win98 files in which case this is still easy. Go to , get a DOS bootdisk and simply put it in to boot from. Or check out if you'd want to make a bootable cd.

if you'd want to create a dual boot environment with Win98 and XP, check out

The bootdisk/dual booting options won't work if you chose to install XP with NTFS.

Edit: I guess I should tell you why the boot to command prompt option isnt' available in XP. Win95, 98, and ME were built on top of DOS. They actually needed to boot into DOS first before loading Windows. Windows NT, 2000, and XP don't use dos at all. They actually use a OS very similar to UNIX to start out on, then load windows. This UNIX like Kernel is MUCH better than the DOS version ever was.

Edit#2 I said about NTFS before, but didn't explain what it was. NTFS is a new file system that microsoft created. It handles storage of files much better than FAT and FAT32 (which win98 uses) It also increases security by a factor of about 1,000. The only problem with it is DOS does not see or recognise NTFS without buying a program such as NTFSDOS. I don't know of any freeware programs that can read and write to NTFS partitions.

So long answer to ask another question. Why do you need to boot into DOS?

The name of the program bob is Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I've seen it in action and it allows you to run multiple OS's in a virtual enviroment. It does put a strain on your system so make sure you beef up the ram.