MS-DOS Startup Disk Problems

[Guest_imported]

I made an MS-DOS startup disk, and i rebooted. The program started up fine, but it will NOT recognize my hard drive and CD-ROM drives. I use the NTFS for my HDD; which I heard that poses the problem.

 

[Stealer]

A regular DOs boot disk will not see NTFS partitions. As far as the cd rom goes, Does the boot disk have cd rom drivers on it? Try going to bootdisk.com and downloading a win98 boot disk. That should fix the cd rom problem. Someone else here I am sure can give you more info on your NTFS problem.

Good Luck
Stealer

 

[linney]

NTFSDOS.EXE is a file system driver for DOS/Windows
that is able to recognize and mount NTFS drives for transparent access. It makes NTFS drives appear indistinguishable from standard FAT drives, providing the ability to navigate, view and execute programs on them from DOS or from Windows, including from the Windows 3.1 File Manager and Windows 95 Explorer.


It is Freeware but limited to read only access.
The latest version of NTFSDOS can be found at

http://www.sysinternals.com

A full read/write version of NTFSDOS is available in the form of NTFSDOS Professional, available for purchase online at
Winternals Software -

http://www.winternals.com.

 

[1Bullet]

Im little confused. Sounds like you had windows XP as an operating system and you chose your partiton in NTSF and your boot disc is for windows 98 Fat32. If it something like this you will have to remove the NTSF partition as your harddrive is NTSF formatted. XP will allow to format in either NTSF or Fat32. A little more detail would help.

 

[alphaphi]

Yes, this is confusing...the boot disk XP can generate is UNABLE to access a NTFS partition if you choose NTFS at install time (or if you converted your partition later).

NTFS is a file system designed for security (advanced sharing capabilities and protection, drive mirroring...) and capacity (theoretical capacity of a NTFS partition is 2**64 bytes). It has extended file attributes and builtin data compression.

But NTFS partitions are only used with Win NT, Win 2000 and Win XP; other OS (MS-DOS, 95, 98 and ME) are not even able to recognize such a partition. This is the reason why a DOS boot diskette (such as the one XP itself can produce!) is unable to see and to handle a NTFS partition.

Linney suggests using NTFSDOS: I see no other way of accessing such a partition from DOS.

The features NTFS offers are required for corporate/networked users; I do not see clearly what advantage a home user with only one machine can have in using it (possibly "confidential" attribute for the "My Documents" folder if user switching is used).

To convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS, you only need to type "CONVERT C: TO NTFS" in a DOS window.

The reverse conversion, NTFS to FAT32, requires a tool like Powerquest Partition Magic. Be aware that only the version 7 of this program can handle NTFS partitions created by XP...and that all "extended file attributes" of NTFS, if used, are lost in this operation.

 

[snee]

There is a freeware prog @

http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

that may help you out.

 

[ie6user]

You could always get a (recent) linux set up- the NTFS file system driver has a experimental write-enable setting..

I tried it a couple of times, and 2 times it worked... (and for the others times: a sector image restored through the net worked wonders)..

But this is probably not something you want to do if you have never done so before...

As for benefits of NTFS for home users: the journalling makes for a far more stable file systems; especially home users tend to pull the plug more than average....
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saybibi();
//john
#include <stddiscl.h>