FreeDOS root fat kernel??? What is it?

[Socio]

I did a fresh install of WindowsXP Pro yesterday and all was fine, this afternoon I booted up and saw "FreeDOS root fat kernel" loading just before the XP welcome screen pops up. I have never seen that before and I know its not part of the WindowsXP kernel. Anyone have any Idea what that is and if it should be there, if not, then how to remove?

Thanks

Socio

 

[Sunner]

Don't know why you'd have it on your computer, but FreeDOS is a project to create a free MS-DOS compatible OS.

About FreeDOS.

 

[drag]

That is queer...

Could be some dirt left over in the MBR (MBR is just the first few sectors of the harddisk that is set asside for the bootloader), I know that the dos-based MBR formats aren't complete and will leave portions of the MBR unformated. This of course can cause issues with non-native bootloaders and you can't delete them thru the normal means sometimes.

Maybe somebody uses freedos-based apps to test the harddrive or something, so when you formated over whatever crap was on the HD when you installed XP, but the boot loader left a couple bits and peices untouched.

Then the bootloader has part of the programming instructions "read from here to the there and format output to screen" and from "here to there" may include a some ascii characters that got missed in the when the NT bootloader overwrote whatever was there in the beginning.

Very weird.

 

[Socio]

That could be because when I did the fresh install I chose the "quick format" mode so it could have left some stuff behind. I think I will do a new install using full format mode this time just to be safe.

Thanks for the info!

Socio