boot order discrepancy for 9x

ComputerProf

I'm an instructor at a technical college. For years I've believed the DOS/9x boot order to be:

IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
AUTOEXEC.BAT

Most of my colleagues who teach in this area also think this. Mostly for the reason that you would need the command interpreter to parse some of the lines in the CONFIG.SYS. However, it seems there are a lot of A+ prep books/materials that now say the CONFIG.SYS comes before the COMMAND.COM.

Does anyone have a definitive answer? I thought I would ask here first before I have to actually find a 98 CD and build a system. Thanks.

Prof

reloaded

Hmm, I sense controversy here. I just got done studying for A+ and it's exactly how you describe it - the order the books say and what you teach is different. This is what Microsoft says:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/win95/w9p9744.mspx

According to that, you're right...the order is:

IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
AUTOEXEC.BAT

ComputerProf

Thank you for your answer. So, the question is then, what does the A+ exam think it is?

Webmaster

Sometimes I really wonder how they get away with it. It seems that they just don't do the proper research and worse, repeat each other's mistakes. Making mistakes is ok in my book, but getting the boot order wrong while you can get that information from www.microsoft.com is...

ComputerProf wrote:

Thank you for your answer. So, the question is then, what does the A+ exam think it is?

My bet is that CompTIA got this right in the actual exam though. Though, even if the A+ wouldn't 'agree' with the correct info from MS, I'd still answer with that correct info

entzilla

Do they ask about HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for the boot order on the A+ exam?

I thought it went:
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
CONFIG.SYS
(CONFIG.SYS launches HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE)
COMMAND.COM
AUTOEXEC.BAT

I guess I've been wrong.

reloaded

Do they ask about HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for the boot order on the A+ exam?

I believe I had maybe one or two questions on the above topic. I believe these are also on the exam objectives and grouped together with other important boot/system files. Might be a good idea to know what's up with them.