Force windows xp to boot to dos

Click "OK" to continue. Please note that you'll only need the i folder. Instructions for doing so vary wildly from system to system, but generally entail the following:. Hotkey instructions are generally provided on the screen. Assuming that it is supported as is the case with virtually all modern hardware , promote your USB drive to the primary boot device. Please notice that you can seriously screw up your system by providing incorrect BIOS settings! Depending on the speed of your USB drive, this may take a while.

Is the USB device listed and does it have top priority? Have you correctly prepared the USB drive in step one? Restart the procedure. Does your USB drive properly support being booted from? Try another one! Step 4: Prepping the Hard Disk. You need to make sure that your hard drive is partitioned and formatted properly. If you suspect that Windows XP won't boot because the partition boot sector has been corrupted, you can use a special Recovery Console tool called Fixboot to fix it. Where [drive] is the letter of the drive to which you want to write a new partition boot sector.

The master boot record occupies the first sector on the hard disk and is responsible for initiating the Windows boot procedure.

The master boot record contains the partition table for the disk as well as a small program called the master boot code , which is responsible for locating the active, or bootable, partition, in the partition table.

Once this occurs, the partition boot sector takes over and begins loading Windows. If the master boot record is corrupt, the partition boot sector can't do its job and Windows won't boot.

If you suspect Windows XP won't boot because the master boot record has been corrupted, you can use the Recovery Console tool Fixmbr to fix it. For example, the device pathname format for a standard bootable drive C configuration would look like this:. When Windows XP encounters a fatal error, the default setting for handling such an error is to automatically reboot the system.

If the error occurs while Windows XP is booting, the operating system will become stuck in a reboot cycle--rebooting over and over instead of starting up normally.

In that case, you'll need to disable the option for automatically restarting on system failure. When Windows XP begins to boot up and you see the message Please select the operating system to start or hear the single beep, press [F8] to display the Windows Advanced Options Menu.

Now, Windows XP will hang up when it encounters the error and with any luck, it will display a stop message you can use to diagnose the problem.

If you can't seem to repair a Windows XP system that won't boot and you have a recent backup, you can restore the system from the backup media. The method you use to restore the system will depend on what backup utility you used, so you'll need to follow the utility's instructions on how to perform a restore operation. If you can't repair a Windows XP system that won't boot and you don't have a recent backup, you can perform an in-place upgrade.

Doing so reinstalls the operating system into the same folder, just as if you were upgrading from one version of Windows to another. A USB device needs to have a master boot record in the boot sector for a computer to be able to boot from it. The boot sector includes the necessary instructions for a computer to boot to an operating system or program on a storage device. Formatting the drive for boot requires using the command line prompt as an administrator.

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