The hard drive is 1 drive with 3 partitions.
the partition types are...
fat16 type DE which hides the partition and unhides it when I access it throuth the Bios F12 boot to the utility programs...with full version dos 7.10 + lots of extras.
no problem there...

fat 32 I am building as a system restore partition which I need hidden from windows and unhidden to access from DOS.

question is....

after booting into and residing in DOS..

How do I unhide the fat32 partition without rebooting to enable dos to access the fat32 partition and run the system restore utilitys.

Then rehide the partition before rebooting to windows?

DRIVEPARM ?

BIOS I belive changes the drive type from DE to 06 when I press F12 this is part of the MBR code I would like to add code to the MBR if I could and set up an additional event F2 to setup, F12 to utillity , F11 to system restore.
Dell ships the system with its own MBR code whish is lost when reformating and is non-restorable.
I fingure if they can do it it can be done.
they have exec files to check for exsisting ghost files and such i dont need to do all that sence i dont have there image file anymore but i have my own.

The General hardware Forum may of been better for this, I think you should look for a 3rd party boot manager, it is not really anything to do with Standalone DOS par-se:

http://www.osloader.com/

I use Partition Magic to hide/unhide partitions and set them active. However I do need to reboot for the changes to become active. I do remember a program that mounted and unmounted drives that were connected to the parallel port adapter without rebooting.

I found what i needed here
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html

thankyou

How did you do it?