         MS-DOS 5.0 and above SECRETS, including MS-DOS 7.00


* COMMAND.COM /F removes the "Abort, Retry, Fail" message and forces a
"Fail" response to all "Abort, Retry, Fail" prompts issued by the DOS
critical error handler. If the floppy disk is not ready it automatically
goes to Fail. This switch can be used on the CONFIG.SYS file SHELL= line
(example):
SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /E:512 /P /F
NOTE: To become familiar with COMMAND.COM's command line switches:
1. Users of Windows 95, read the text file CONFIG.TXT (the SHELL/COMMAND
topics), located in your Win95 folder (usually \WINDOWS).
2. Users of Win3.1x/MS-DOS 6.xx, run this command from a DOS prompt:
HELP COMMAND

* FDISK /MBR repairs a damaged boot sector by overwriting it with a fresh
copy (writes a new Master Boot Record to the hard disk without altering the
partition table information).
WARNING: Writing the master boot record to the hard disk in this manner can
make certain hard disks partitioned with SpeedStor unusable. It can also
cause problems for some dual-boot programs, or for disks with more than 4
partitions !!!
The DEFINITION of MBR: at the end of the ROM BIOS bootstrap routine the BIOS
will read and execute the first physical sector of the first floppy or hard
drive on the system.
This first sector of the hard disk is called the Master Boot Record (MBR),
or partition table or master boot block. At the beginning of this sector of
the hard disk is a small program. At the end of this sector is where the
partition table is stored. This program uses the partition information to
determine which partition is bootable (usually the first primary DOS
partition) and attempts to boot from it.


* MEM /A displays a short summary screen of your memory configuration and
also the status of the HMA.
HMA (High Memory Area) is a little known 64KB area just above the first
MegaByte (1MB=1024KB=1048576Bytes) of RAM mapped by MS-DOS's HIMEM.SYS
memory manager.
DOS itself and the MS-DOS BUFFERS usually load into the HMA.
Example of high DOS enabled by this line in CONFIG.SYS:
DOS=HIGH,UMB