Off topic: enhanced DOS

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Jordan, Windows 9x, though not Me, Y2K, and XP, is underlain by a real
DOS. I just tried accessing my largest single partition (C:, which is
roughly 9 Gig; the whole drive is 40 G, but only 20 are allowed to
Microslush, and that 20 G is partitioned into 4 logical drives) from Win
98, 2d ed.'s, DOS both from a Restart in MS-DOS mode, a reboot and then
Command prompt only (by hitting F8), and a reboot from a plain-vanilla
boot floppy. All were able to "see" the whole Drive C: with the chkdsk
command. Will try the same thing on the--I think--20 G drives in the
office this afternoon (all one huge drive C: IDIOTIC!). I do have a copy
of Novell DOS 7 (which is what TTG ran XyDOS on) somewhere, and will see
what booting from that yields, but I very much doubt it can read FAT32,
though its memory managing capabilities--DOS Protected mode, meaning it
could access all your RAM--were far superior to Microsoft's.
	By the by, perhaps DOS (pre 32-bit Windows) cannot "see" FAT32 drives,
but Xy can. All four of my logical drives are FAT32, but Xy sits on one
(D:) and reads and writes files to all four, most especially E:, my data
drive. (Except, of course, C:\ProgramFiles, as we've discussed here
before.) With 8.3 filenames of course, but it reads them.
	I agree 101 percent with Jordan on the need for DOS for low-level
management things. And others. Often it's much quicker to do XCOPY
d:\*.xyt h: /s /v /d:MM-DD-YYYY than to go through the maze of pointing
and clicking to open a drive, arrange the files by date, eyeball them to
see which are later than the last backup, and then select them and either
drag and drop or Ctrl C, then open another drive and CTRL V.
Patricia