How To Select Your Boot Drive

You may need to select your boot drive if you're reformatting your machine or for a variety of other reasons, we're also commonly asked for info on how to boot up from a CD drive.The process is relatively straightforward, we're dealing with a Toshiba machine below but the procedure is very similar for most laptops and desktop machines.

You'll commonly hear about a boot order or boot priority, what this refers to is the sequence that your bios looks for from your bootable devices ie. CD ROMs, floppy drives, USB drives, hard drives and even SD cards.

If you want to boot from some of these devices you will need to ensure first of all they are installed with a bootable area and you'll need to create a boot disc. 

Creating an MS-DOS start up disc from within Windows

The MS-DOS startup disk you create will allow you to disk into MS-DOS.

1. Insert a floppy disk into your computer's floppy drive.
2. Open My Computer, and then click the floppy disk drive to select it.
3. On the File menu, point to the name of the floppy drive, and then click Format.
4. Under Format options, click Create an MS-DOS startup disk.
5. Click Start.

Note: Creating an MS-Dos start up disc will erase any information on the disc and will only allow the system to boot into an MS-DOS prompt. The disc won't contain any additional tools.

DOS Tips

In order to select your boot drive you will need a basic knowledge of DOS commands, the information below is from the Windows Help system. Type 'DOS commands' into the search window in Windows Help and you'll get all the information you need to operate within the command prompt or DOS environment.

Changing the default drive

To change the default drive, simply type the letter of the your choice. The new default will be listed in subsequent DOS prompts. 

Example:

• C> A: [enter]
• Changes the default drive from C to A
• A> C: [enter]
• Changes the default drive from A to C

[enter] means that you must press the Enter Key before the format command will execute. [Enter] is required after any DOS command, it is assumed in all commands found below. 

CHDIR (CD) Change Directory Command

Once you have located the directory you want, you may move from directory to directory using the CD command (change directory).
(we've written the word 'backslash' here because the character doesn't always display properly in web browsers, use the actual symbol in your commands)

Example:

• C> cd furniture
• Moves you to the directory called 'FURNITURE'
• C> cd backslashfurniturebackslashchairs
• Moves you to the directory called 'CHAIRS' under the directory called 'FURNITURE'
• C> cd ..
• Moves you up one level in the path
• C> cd backslash
• Takes you back to the root directory (c: in this case)