>Another, better, option IMO if you've got the money to invest in a tool is Winternals' ERD Commander Pro, which creates an NT boot floppy with a command console and a great deal of useful command line functionality. it's paid for itself many times over for me. www.winternals.com - so far, they've produced a whole lot of winning software solutions such as NTFSDOS, FAT32 for WinNT, and a bunch of admin and recovery tools. These guys really know their stuff.

Perhaps that was what my LAN buddy used to create the bootup so we could get in to fix things, I'll check next time I bump into him. They need some tool like that, if they're going to tighten security so much as to have DOS-bootup editing and VGA unavailable even to administrators like me...

BTW, it turned out I discovered an agency-wide major NT bug. Setting resolution to 1600 on *any* NT machine causes the total screen blackout. They're analyzing the problem now to see why it occurs and how to resolve it...