I've tried to boot into MS-DOS using both floppy (windows format) and a usb flash drive (HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool) then i restart pc and go to bios to change boot sequence. The problem is that whenever i boot from either all i get is a black DOS looking screen with the letter 'j' and i'm pretty miffed as to why it wont start dos, i've searched everywhere and cant seem to find anything on this issue, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Graeme

Something tells me you've never seen a DOS/command-prompt boot before. Your "j" is likely where the USB drive/floppy is located on the machine, and if you boot straight to it you'd only see the prompt for the active drive, and white text on a black background is the default color for the aforementioned... (BTW---this is more of an XP issue and would be better posted in the XP forum)

Is it showing J:\> or just J Describe what you mean by "floppy (windows format)" How was the floppy bootdisk created?

hi it was only a 'j' but i found a way around my problem without booting dos so thanks for your help but no longer needed, and btw my floppy drive is a: also by windows format i meant i right clicked my floppy drive in XP and and selected format to create a bootdisk for dos but thanks for your replies

We're glad you got it going. For what it's worth, if all you did was format a floppy disk then that was your problem. You need a formatted floppy disk WITH dos or some OS system files on it.

Sorry i should have said i formatted it with boot files from windows 98, but i found a way to fix my problem without using dos