Any way to bypass autoexec.bat in MS DOS 3.21?

[roberttx]

I know how to do it in 6.22, but is there any way of doing it in 3.21?

Thanks

 

[Lutiana]

Have you tried holding down shift as DOS starts up?

 

[Stone]

Delete it or rename it.

 

[roberttx]

Problem was, it was running a menu routine that made the display unreadable and I couldn't get it to boot from floppy.

Problem solved - after I extracted the baseball card that somebody had lodged in the floppy drive and gave the heads a good clean, I was able to get it to boot from floppy.

Shift didn't work, but it would still be interesting to know whether there's any way of bypassing it in older versions.

 

[Agent Orange]

You can try pressing F5 on boot. Another option is to rename the AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOEXEC.BA_ or something similar. Try Google. Also, you could just REM out the offending line(s) in your present AUTOEXEC.BAT.

 

[Stone]

Problem was, it was running a menu routine that made the display unreadable and I couldn't get it to boot from floppy.

You could have interrupted the execution of the config.sys with a (Ctrl+Break) and then dealt with the autoexec.bat after the system had booted without reading it.

 

[krebizfan]

DOS 5 was the first version use <SHIFT> to skip; DOS 6 was the first to have <F5> and <F8> to skip. Those were the versions when it was likely for a system to lack a floppy drive; earlier versions left maintenance to floppy boot.

Note DOS 6 has a CONFIG.SYS option SWITCHES=/n which prevents the use of any key to skip CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT. Keep a floppy handy.

 

[roberttx]

Thanks chaps. Ctrl+C does the job as well. Amazing what you forget...