The PE format starts with an MS-DOS stub of exactly the following 128 bytes to be placed at the front of the module. At offset 0x3c in the DOS header is a 4-byte unsigned integer offset, lfanew, to the PE signature (shall be "PE\0\0"), immediately followed by the PE file header.
| 0x4d | 0x5a | 0x90 | 0x00 | 0x03 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x04 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0xFF | 0xFF | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0xb8 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x40 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |
| 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | lfanew | |||
| 0x0e | 0x1f | 0xba | 0x0e | 0x00 | 0xb4 | 0x09 | 0xcd |
| 0x21 | 0xb8 | 0x01 | 0x4c | 0xcd | 0x21 | 0x54 | 0x68 |
| 0x69 | 0x73 | 0x20 | 0x70 | 0x72 | 0x6f | 0x67 | 0x72 |
| 0x61 | 0x6d | 0x20 | 0x63 | 0x61 | 0x6e | 0x6e | 0x6f |
| 0x74 | 0x20 | 0x62 | 0x65 | 0x20 | 0x72 | 0x75 | 0x6e |
| 0x20 | 0x69 | 0x6e | 0x20 | 0x44 | 0x4f | 0x53 | 0x20 |
| 0x6d | 0x6f | 0x64 | 0x65 | 0x2e | 0x0d | 0x0d | 0x0a |
| 0x24 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x00 |