Are recent versions of ms windows built on top of a dos shell?

I wonder if someone could kindly answer this question, I recently argued with a friend that Win XP/Vista/7 is still, in a manner of speaking, built on top of DOS, I know its not the old DOS setup but as I understand it, DOS is still incorporated in the bootloader and there is still an underlying "shell" also called cmd.exe or command.com

I cant remember which, and am not certain if I am right or wrong, hence the question. I would be very grateful if someone could put me right as hate to be wrong about something like this.

 

No, you are thinking of "bootstrapping".
Also from NT4/XP on up is based on the NT4 kernel which use the command line interface (looks like DOS).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

 

Thanks elbiatcho1, which aspect or part of the bootstrapping process is related to or consists partly of DOS then?

 

My understanding is that as of XP the boot process no longer uses DOS at all.

BIOS identifies the first boot device and passes control. The boot sector of the boot device looks for the Active flag on a partition and passes control. The partition boot sector looks for a bootable file - ntldr in the case of XP - and passes control. ntldr is not DOS based, so the answer I believe is no.

 

Thanks a lot