Might not do you any good to be in DOS...
DOS does not "do" NTFS so you would not see the drive contents...
I you have a FAT (or FAT32) partition, just get a Win95B, Win98+
boot disk and have at it...

A more "global" answer (one size destroys all) would be to use the
Control Panel,
Administrative Tools,
Computer Management,
Disk Management,
to format the drive from inside WinXP. This was written from
an XP-Pro machine, (I rarely see "XP-Home" so the "path" might be
a little different...

Move any data you want to keep  to the new drive before formatting
since formatting will erase EVERYTHING...
(You can always move data back later if you want...)

If that is not a good answer for your circumstances, there are some
other possibilities with some special tools. (I have not tried them for
this particular problem, so wait for the other members of the list to
voice their collective wisdom...)

                                           Rick Glazier

From: "Ken Shearer" <[log in to unmask]>

> How to boot directly to DOS on a Win XP Pro machine?
>
> Installed a new C: drive and installed new copy of Win XP there.
>Moved old HDD to D: in the same machine, and the old installation
>of Win XP is there also. Want to use the D: drive ONLY for data storage,
>and get rid of the old Win XP thereon.  I've been able to do that except
>for the 'Documents and Settings' folder.  If simply try to delete d:\documents
>and settings from the new XP environment, it says 'access denied.'
>So I suspect I'll have to boot directly into DOS to get around this.

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