Your main purpose right now is to “restore that backed-up operating system on the hard disk onto the current system.” I wonder if I've made that clear. Actually this is very simple: use a ghost boot disk to start the system, then find the backed-up system on the hard disk and restore it. This site has that kind of boot disk.
But I'm worried whether you know how to make the boot disk image into a boot floppy ?????????
That backed-up system on the hard disk should exist in the form of a file, just like wearing clothes on your body, then making another identical set and wrapping it up in a bundle. That bundle looks like one thing, but actually there are a lot of things inside it. The restoration process is just like taking the clothes back out of the bundle and putting them on again.
The idea of files in dos
A file in a computer is a collection of information. All programs and data in dos are stored on disk in the form of files.
To distinguish these different files, each file must have a name, that is, a filename. To make it easier to
handle different types of files, different types of files are stored in different directories on the hard disk.
To use an analogy, the computer's hard disk is like a filing cabinet, and the different partitions on the hard disk (drive C, drive D, drive E, etc.)
are like different sections in the filing cabinet, while the different directories on the hard disk partitions (called folders in windows) are like file folders
in the different sections of the filing cabinet. Folders can also contain folders.
So how are files on the hard disk represented? This question can be explained with the following example.
For example: on drive C there is a folder called windows, and inside the windows folder there is another folder
called system, and inside that folder there is a file called Abcsda.dll.
This can be written as: "c:\windows\system\abcsda.dll"
Among this, "c:\windows\system\" is called the path of the file "abcsda.dll", while "c:\" is called the root directory
of drive C. There are many files in the system that are used to start the system; they have to be placed openly outside,
and cannot be put in folders. That is, they must exist in the root directory of the boot partition.
Files can roughly be divided into data files and program files. Data files can further be divided into text files and non-text files. Text
files store information that people can directly understand, while non-text files store internal computer information or information that needs
special programs to convert before people can understand it. Program files store computer instructions; by running program
files, the computer can be made to complete a certain specific function. So how can one distinguish the type of a file? This involves file
naming.
Usually a filename is made up of two parts, namely the main filename and the extension. The main filename and extension are
separated by a dot (.). The extension is generally three letters and is used to indicate the file type. The main filename usually indicates
the content of the file, and in pure dos status at most 8 letters (including 0-9) can be used.
The extensions of program files containing computer instructions are com, exe, bat
Among them, bat files are also called batch files, meaning files that execute programs in batches. Their file contents are some computer
instructions and files such as com, exe, bat that contain computer instructions, and at the same time they are also text-type files.
