DOSBox is a full PC emulator intended for games. It will not give programs direct access to your hardware, you are essentially looking at the wrong solution.

Checkout FreeDOS instead; it's an operating system intended to run native on your PC.

Get the Windows version or use the plain WinXP's NTVDM.

or don't use a drive imaging program that relies on MS-DOS.

It's 2009 use a imaging program that relies on Linux or Windows.

Agreed. Not a good idea. Unless you have some old images that you desperately needs to restore, use a newer program.

and it was sugggested to me that I try DOSBox

Who suggested that?

^Someone in another computer forum, Computer Hope.

Do any other drive image programs include the ability to alter partition records directly? I want make changes to the MBR and PBR directly which is likely out of the realm for anything running within windows.

What can you do with the MBR in DOS that you cannot do in Windows? (There are tons of Windows utilities to do this)

and what exactly are you doing with the MBR?

Why, who, what, why?

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/ptedit.htm

Not sure what you're trying to accomplish, but go get RIP and use the included fdisk/ntfsprogs to edit various things (I'm sure there's a program there to manipulate FAT, but I haven't dealt with FAT systems in ages).

Anyway, this is all out of scope for this forum...

qz33 wrote:

^Someone in another computer forum, Computer Hope.

It seems they chose the right name for the forum, "hope" instead of "knowledge". No emulator will give you direct access to hardware resources. That would be a violation of basic principles of emulation.

qz33 wrote:

Do any other drive image programs include the ability to alter partition records directly? I want make changes to the MBR and PBR directly which is likely out of the realm for anything running within windows.

Create a DOS boot CD with UBCD. Or use a installed Linux system or live CD. The best choice would be: don't manually alter stuff you do not understand.