Is there a program that will let me copy files at the DOS level

Don't you ever sleep?  I need to be able to boot to a disk of some sorts.  Are you saying a 98 boot disk would work?  

... be careful, however ==> XXCopy is VERY powerful at what it can do; and if you set the WRONG options it will gladly do exactly what you told it -- which may NOT be what you meant to do !!

I'd use XXCopy from a command prompt from within Windows -- that way you have full long file name support.   The problem with copying files from a Win98 boot disk is you'll only copy the 8.3 filenames.   There are utilities that will extract and restore the LFN info -- but that seems an unnecessary (and easy-to-forget) step.   Is there a reason you don't want to do this from within the Windows environment (or at least a Windows command prompt)??

... if you really want to boot independently, but still have good file management tools available, I would create a bootable Bart's PE CD  (basically Windows on CD) ==> you can boot to this CD and still have Windows Explorer available to do all your file transfers.   If you're not familiar with this, check out  http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I believe I have that on a bootable DVD i'll boot to it and see.  I just never new what it was to be honest with you.

use xcopy

BR Dushan

Dont boot 98 from CD/DVD, the drive support is not included, it can lose its own source disk.
Always boot 98SE from a floppy.  Set up a 98 SE boot disk with format, fdisk, attrib, xcopy, xcopy32 etc.
Boot from this.  Now say you have all files on C: that you want to copy to D:, including XP setup.

Issue -- xcopy32 C:\*.* D:\ /r/s/h/e/c/k
and if you want to just update the files, issue at dos prompt --
xcopy32 C:\*.* D:\  /r/s/h/e/c/h/d
The d parameter is the update one.

You can clone an ENTIRE XP setup using this simple command.  Some say it not work for links, I find it work 101% of the time, I have never had a problem in over 20,000 xcopy procedures.

Use robocopy, it is part of the resource kit tools:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en

As mentioned above you need a boot disk that supports your filesystems, if you are copying something better than what got written with win 9x, you need ntfs support, and then you need bart's CD or the ubcd4win

http://ubcd4win.com/

You could also use a liveCD like knoppix, but the current version doesn't have write support for ntfs drives (version 5 should be out these days and might have ntfs support, I don't know). You can still use knoppix to copy files from ntfs to fat32 though.

http://knoppix.net

Here's some more info about the " Greatest " ROBOCOPY :

" http://www.ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html "

Best Regards !

Free xx works great.  Thanks Gary

You're most welcome.   XXCopy is a really powerful tool -- I use it a lot.