restart in MSDOS?

[flyer2308]

Hey,

Just a quick question,

How do i restart in msdos, i have windows ME (TOTALLY PANTS) and am reformatting my hard drive.

If i go to shutdown the usual options are there,

Restart,
Shutdown,
Hibernate,
Standby,

but no restart in msdos,

How do i do this?

any ideas?
Regards Dale

[bblank]

Create a startup disk and boot from that. (To create a startup disk, open Add/Remove programs from the Control Panel and click on the startup disk tab).

[flyer2308]

I would but i can't use the floppy drive as theres a conflict somewhere, and it won't read from the drive.

I'm hoping that reformating the hd will correct this along with many other problems with ME

Dale

[bblank]

I have access to several machines so my preference would be to remove the drive and test it on another machine. Alternatively, I keep a spare floppy drive - they are only about $20 here - and I would put the new one in an empty bay and switch the cables from the existing one to the new one.
I don't like to mess around without knowing for sure that I can boot to dos in an emergency.

That said, two possible solutions. One would be to change the value of bootgui to 0 in c:\msdos.sys Details may be found at
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-021
Without a working floppy drive to boot from in case of problems this would worry me. (Can you boot from another drive in an emergency?)

The other possible solution is to use a patch at http://www.geocities.com/mfd4life_2000/
I have never tried it and don't know how safe it is. (However, the link was given in a thread at annoyances.org and nobody posted a warning afterwards.)

[stagger]

Are you saying you can't ever read from the floppy drive or just that you can't boot from it? If it's just the later check the boot disk sequence in the BIOS.

If the floppy is first in the boot sequence and it still isn't accessed then the problem can't lie in the Windows installation can it? Must be hardware fault somewhere.

What do you see on the screen with a bootable floppy in the drive on startup? Does it even spin?

Could always boot from a CD-ROM if you can enable that option in the BIOS.