boot into DOS?

[George Hester]

I would love to see a MS-DOS boot disk get into my Windows 2000 Partition. No way man. If you loaded a MS-DOS boot disk in my system off the A drive and typed C: I wonder where you'd end up? Definitely not in my Windows 2000 Partition. In fact you might end up in my little boot partition but I doubt that also. DOS reads FAT-12?

 

[IOStorm]

I would love to see a MS-DOS boot disk get into my Windows 2000 Partition. No way man. If you loaded a MS-DOS boot disk in my system off the A drive and typed C: I wonder where you'd end up? Definitely not in my Windows 2000 Partition. In fact you might end up in my little boot partition but I doubt that also. DOS reads FAT-12?

An MS-DOS Floppy *is* Fat12. You might be talking about something
else.

Regardless, it isn't MS-DOS that does the "getting in to"... It is
various utilities that run in MS-DOS. Name any file system and there
will likely be a DOS driver for it.

Hell, even Ghost itself can get you at the files. Just Ghost a
partition and open the image with Ghost Explorer on another system.
The file systems permissions don't mean a thing in an image file.

If you even allow your system to boot from drive A:, your security is
non-existent.

 

[Ricardo M. Urbano - W2K/NT4 MVP]

Juan, I am not familiar w/ ERUNT. You might be better served starting a
new thread so that someone who is might see the question.

 

[IOStorm]

Isn't DOS 7 Windows 98?

Yes, Windows 98 runs on top of DOS 7.1

I have long since taken all the usually DOS utilities out of a Win98
install (and there are some on the Win98 CD, QBasic.exe and such) for
use as a stand-alone system.

I also keep a backup copy of MSDOS.SYS with the settings:

[Options]
BootGUI=0
Logo=0

....added in so that I don't see the Win98 graphic when I boot.

 

[IOStorm]

If you want DOS then you use a FAT16. If you are using Windows 98 MS-DOS 7 then FAT16 or FAT32 don't matter. Usually the DOS partition will be your first partition on the primary harddrive. Can be no bigger then 2GB if True DOS. I think FAT32 is restricted to around 30GB. Use your Partition Manager to make sure DOS is installed on C drive. This does not mean you change what you have. It only means that when you install DOS that the active Partition is the partition you want to install in. One thing you need to be aware of is that you may overwrite your boot partition and make Windows 2000 no longer bootable. I hope your boot manager can take this into account. This is one reason why the Boot Manager should be in the DOS partition on a FAT16.

It doesn't particularly matter if it's plain old DOS, since long file
names aren't supported anyway.

But it depends on what you use to create the partitions. If you're
using Fdisk and Format from DOS7.1, then it doesn't bother asking you
if you want FAT16 or FAT32. I forget the size trigger, but if you
make a partition of a sufficient size, format.com will always format
it as FAT32.