Get DOS or Win 95 prompt each time your PC starts
Get DOS or Win 95 prompt each time your PC starts
Tip Windows 95 gives you a large number of different start-up choices. All it takes is a little editing of the msdos.sys file in your root directory. Here's what to do. In Explorer, choose View--Options and make sure that Show all files is selected. Click OK. Next, locate msdos.sys in the root directory of your start-up drive. Right-click the file and choose Properties. In the resulting dialogue box, uncheck the Read-only attribute and click OK. Now choose Start--Run, type notepad c:\msdos.sys, and press <Enter>. (If you're using a diskwide compression program such as DriveSpace, replace c: with the appropriate host drive letter.)  Force Windows 95 to display a menu of start-up options by editing the msdos.sys file When the file opens in Notepad, look for the [Options] heading. If you see a line that begins BootMenu=, edit it to read BootMenu=1 (or add the line if it's not there). This forces Windows to display a menu of op-tions each time you start your computer. Just press the number of your choice, and away you go. If you don't make a choice, Windows will use whichever option is set as the boot menu default. To set that default yourself, you need a line like BootMenuDefault=1. The number corresponds to the numbers in the Startup menu. For example, you'd use the number 1 to make Windows the default, 3 to make Windows' Safe mode the default, 6 to make MS-DOS mode the default, and so on. If you want to be able to boot to your previous version of DOS -- and you have not removed it from your system -- make sure the file has the line BootMulti=1. (Use BootMenuDefault=8 to make this the default.) To determine how long Windows waits for you to make a choice from the menu before using its default of 30 seconds, type a line like BootMenuDelay=10, which tells Windows how many seconds (in this case, 10) to wait for you to choose. While you're at it, make sure that your file has a BootDelay=0 line so that you get the Startup menu as soon as possible. Now save the file and then exit. That's all there is to it. The next time you reboot your PC, you'll have a lot more control over how things start up. - Scott Dunn | Category: Win95 Issue: Apr 1998 |
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