Dos Recovery disk can be very helpful when your system fails to boot. First, it’s very easy to make, and can save you from considerable amount of time if you need to access the files from your computer. Even if you have Windows 95/98/2000/Me/XP you’ll need this.

But why a Dos Recovery Disk ? Well, Windows platform is based on MS-DOS, which was used well before Windows 3.1 appeared. And because of that with an MS-DOS disk you can operate with the file system. After you create the bootable startup disk you can copy on the diskette a small program called Norton Commander. There is also Voltok Commander. With these you can easily navigate through the file system directory structures, you can copy files and directories from one partition to another. You can even reinstall your operating system if you have the kit files on another partition.

Another advantage of using a Dos Recovery Disk is that you have access to the files of operating system itself. You have a few utilities installed on it. For example the chkdsk program will check your partition for errors or bad sectors. Of course the age of bad sectors on hard disk has passed away, but there aren’t just bad sectors for which reasons your system will not boot. There could be indexing errors or bad associations indexes. But this is also for the old Fat or Fat32 file system.

You also may need a Dos Recovery Disk in case that your system has been infected with a virus. And this is most probable of the situations. There are some viruses that enter in the svchost.exe or even lsass.exe programs which are critical for the boot and function of the Windows OS by changing their memory properties, changing registry values. And the virus starts with the program itself when Windows boots. But these services cannot be stopped after initialisation of the Windows because the running Windows depends on these. Trying to stop these will stop the system itself. It’s very hard to clean a file which is executed when Windows boots. And even you choose to start windows in safe mode without networking by pressing F5 at the boot time, some of these will start. The safer way will be to boot from an Dos recovery disk, and use an antivirus like F-prot or some other antivirus software that can be run under MS-DOS. I suppose now that you have actualized the antivirus database with known viruses recently.

You can simply create a Dos Recovery disk in Windows by clicking Properties on A:\, and clicking on Create Startup Disk. You must have a diskette in the floppy disk drive. This process will format the disk and will copy the core files of the MS-DOS which boot your Windows.