Oh, you are commenting on my "pieces of DOS" statement. I understand what you are saying...and I was inaccurate to use that wording.

The only reason I used the word "pieces", is that I don't believe (and I could be completely wrong) that Windows fully depends on DOS services once it has booted up. For example, does Windows have its own code for file i/o, or does it depend upon DOS? IOW, does Win9x depend on the services of DOS to the same degree as Win3.x did?

>>Dragan,
>>
>>I'm aware of and understand all of what you are saying...I'm taling about running a command prompt *after* windows is up and running. If you run two command prompts, they have separate memory spaces, right? Aren't each of them running under win.exe at that point?
>
>They are, indeed. Just like you could instantiate command.com from practically anything in DOS if you wanted to spawn a process.
>
>My point is that the way w98 "involves DOS in the boot process" is practically "w98 needs DOS7 up and running before it can boot from it", IOW it's sitting on top of DOS, and gets launched from DOS just like any other DOS app, and just like W3.x did. So basically the W9x family (again, don't know a thing about ME except that nobody here likes it) is still sitting on DOS and needs it to boot. OTOH, that DOS is perfectly capable of running for itself without W9x.
>
>I was using DOS7 when I needed to partition a new disk or just start a box from scratch. I would prepare everything from it before actually touching the installation CD.