Various Dopers seem quite knowledgeable about these sorts of things, so I thought I’d give this a try:
I believe there exists a WinXP utility similar to the Win98 Microsoft Backup utility. But I’ve been told by one source that this is only available with XP-Pro. Is there any way to get this for XP-Home without upgrading to XP-Pro (I don’t have much interest in other XP-Pro features)? And is this the right way to do file backups in XP?
On rare occasions, I need to boot my machine into DOS. I figured out how to make a bootable CD (a bit of a struggle for us non-power-users) and how to create a dual-boot setup with BootMagic. What I haven’t been able to figure out is how to make a partition that is “visible” both to DOS and to WinXP. I know it would have to be FAT, and I’ve created a 100Mb FAT partition, but only XP can see it. Does it have to be “close” to the DOS partition to be visible? Is there some trick I’m missing here?
That second partition might not be visible to DOS if it’s after the first ‘x’ gigabytes (1? 4? 8? I’m not sure). Also, make sure it’s FAT16 and not FAT32, which is only supported by Windows 95 OSR2 and later.
My XP installs have always given me problems, and i invariably need to use DOS to fix things up.
It is possible to boot to DOS and have all partitions (barring special cases or incompatible file systems) visible to DOS (including NTFS partitions that are not natively supported by DOS)
NTFS partitions can be mounted in DOS using this freeware program:
i highly recommend ERU. it’s amazingly simple to use, and a life saver. It backs up all critical files and emergency restorations can be performed from DOS using NTFSDOS to load the partition and ERU to restore critical files.
Also, run C:>fdisk /status to see the status of your partitions and what file system they use.