China DOS Union

I'm a DOS newbie. Recently I bought an XP installation CD, but it has to be installed from the DOS interface.
I don't know DOS, so I'm asking all you experts here for some guidance.
Thanks.

Doesn't that XP disc have an option to enter DOS for you to choose? If not, then I don't know either. I'm also asking everyone about this question.

No! If it had a prompt, that would have been great!

1. Preparation: make a Win98 boot disk, then find FORMAT.EXE and SMARTDRV.EXE in the C:\WINDOWS directory of WIN98, and copy them to the boot disk.
2. Set the BIOS to boot from floppy.
3. Restart into DOS with the Win98 boot disk (make sure CD-ROM support is loaded).
4. At the command prompt type:
a:\>format c:/u/q (if you also want DOS to remain there, then use format c:/q/u/s ) press Enter
a:\>SMARTDRV.EXE press Enter
a:\>x: （enter the drive where the XP installer is located）
x:\>cd i386 （enter the directory）
x:\i386>winnt.exe （start the installer）

SMARTDRV.EXE press Enter
a:\>x: （enter the drive where the XP installer is located）
x:\>cd i386 （enter the directory）
x:\i386>winnt.exe （start the installer）

I'd like to ask tq130, I'm also a total newbie. What does SMARTDRV.EXE mean?? Also, yesterday when I tried installing WIN2000, I wanted to COPY it to the hard drive first and then install it (I feel bad for my lovely CD-ROM drive), but after booting with a WIN98 boot disk and formatting drive C, when I entered the installation folder and ran SETUP.EXE, it said this program cannot be run under DOS. So I could only use the bootable WIN2000 CD to install directly. What's the reason for this? What's the difference from what you said above??

From my experience, if your CD supports CD booting, you can use the CD to boot your installer. This is the simplest method, and also the most practical one~

But I don't want to have to read from the CD every time I install!! It's slow and also wears out the CD-ROM drive!! Is there a better way?

Copy I386 to the hard drive

Everyone, I'm a beginner. I'd like to ask how I can back up and restore the system. Thanks!

Do you think it could be a problem with my installation disc?
Because I've tried all of your methods, and they don't work.
The installation disc I used before could go directly into the installation process, but this disc seemed a bit off from the start.
When I double-click it, the message is:
GHOSTERR>TXT not output

ABORT:440,Ghost cannot run on Windows based systems.
Please boot your system into Dos and then run Ghost or
slternatively, run Ghost32(Ghost for Windows).
I don't really understand what it means. I guess it's saying it has to be installed from the DOS interface, right?
But I don't understand DOS, I'm really so dizzy from this!

The following is quoted from xiaojun at 2004-1-26 16:31:16:
I386复制到硬盘里

I copied all the WIN2000 installation files to the hard drive! But it still doesn't work!
After booting with the boot disk, I enter DOS and run SETUP.EXE, but it says this program is not supported under DOS!!

smartdrv is a cache-loading command, meant to make system installation faster.

If you're not going to install from CD, then what are you keeping the CD-ROM drive for
To install with the CD-ROM drive, set the boot order in BIOS to cdrom
If you've already copied it to the hard drive
run smartdrv in DOS
then enter the i386 directory and run winnt instead of setup to install

The following is quoted from kevin882 at 2004-1-28 4:52:11:

The following is quoted from xiaojun at 2004-1-26 16:31:16:
I386复制到硬盘里

I copied all the WIN2000 installation files to the hard drive! But it still doesn't work!
After booting with the boot disk, I enter DOS and run SETUP.EXE, but it says this program is not supported under DOS!!

Run Winnt, not Setup. setup is run under Windows...