? for you computer gurus out there

[Xobeloot]

My system had a major brainfart, and I built my last machine without a floppy drive. For some odd reason, when I go to reformat via booting to CD, it isnt recognizing my disc as bootable. Where my main issue comes in is I cannot remember for the life of me how to boot to a DOS prompt in WinXP so I can just Fdisk and reinstall. I havent had to do it that way in ages.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[snoosiphant]

I have been using linux for a while, but it seems that I remember that you need to press F8 during boot to get a menu that includes a command prompt choice.

[lxskllr]

I'm assuming snoosiphant's suggestion will work. You can use a Knoppix cd http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html to help with some computer recovery tasks. Also I highly recommend Ultimate Boot CD For Windows http://www.ubcd4win.com/ This has to be compiled, so it won't help you right now, but it's well worth the small amount of effort to make once you get Windows back on track.

Edit:
Xobeloot, you have PM

[Xobeloot]

Appreciate the info. I'm watching my folks house this weekend. will use that time to tear down and rebuild my current OS. Gonna spend the rest of this week backing up the stuff I want to keep. This time i wont be lazy and will actually partition my OS onto a minimal drive that can be wiped whenever necessary.

[lxskllr]

This time i wont be lazy and will actually partition my OS onto a minimal drive that can be wiped whenever necessary.

Give careful thought before you partition your hd. A lot of times that can bite you in the ass when you need more room, but you've partitioned yourself into a corner.

I'm personally not a fan of multiple partitions on a hd. I'm running 2 now, but that's so I can dual boot Vista64, and XP32. The next time I do a full O/S install, I'm probably going to wipe the XP partition because I never use it.

If it were me, I'd just use the document folders to keep your data in, then if you need to reinstall, you can backup a few folders, then wipe the drive.

[Shrewd]

I'm glad to see a few fellow linux snusers . I haven't booted Windows at home in over 6 years...

I agree with lxskllr, for Windows I only use 1 partition. My recommendation would be very different for linux, but for Windows 1 partition ought to do the trick.

As for backup, hard drives are cheap enough these days that you could put another one in and make copies of the stuff that's important to you on it. Or if you wanted to get fancy you could set up a raid (I have no idea how to do that in windows - but I'd bet it's pretty straight forward). Now, I design chips for hard drives for a living, so I could just be conning you into buy more drives .

[Xobeloot]

Now, I design chips for hard drives for a living, so I could just be conning you into buy more drives .

How about a free sample of a drive containing your newest chip?

[M0RNA]

You need to make sure that your BIOS is instructed to boot from the CD before the hard drive. On my PC, I'd hit 'Del' just after powering up, and then I can go into the BIOS and change the boot order so that the CD drive was the first bootable device. Save the changes, and power down normally, then boot up again with the CD in the drive. Of course, I can't promise this will do the trick, but I wish you luck

[Shrewd]

Xobeloot:
Unfortunately I work for a vendor to the drive manufacturers. Vendors don't get any samples like that . Otherwise, I'd be keeping them for myself! So all I could really get my hands on are chips that we've designed, which I couldn't hope to use myself in any useful fashion . They're even too small to be cool to anyone other than myself .

[eumaledictio]

I'm sure you've already figured this out, but Windows XP doesn't boot from DOS like previous versions of Windows. DOS is emulated from within XP. This makes it impossible to boot from DOS, short of installing it seperately, running it in safe mode or running it from a boot disk containing DOS. I usually use a live distro when trying to fix my Windows machine, though I do think I've got a disk hidden somewhere with a barebones version of DOS that also includes FDISK and a few other important programs.