Man, how young do you have to be to never have used DOS?!?!
Well, if anyone else is searching for DOS help, note that typing “/?” after a command (ie, “COPY /?”) will display a short usage guide to the command.
Typing “HELP” will give a list of DOS commands in some versions.
And of course, to run DOS in your MSWindows environment of choice, run either “command” or “cmd” from the run menu. And for those who did that and are stuck with a black screen, type “exit” and never look here again.
Nanoda, I think Stinkpalm’s situation was that he had to boot to DOS from a floppy, because Windows wouldn’t load (because it could find file c:\winnt\system32\x).
Thanks for the help. I grew up with DOS but have not used it in so long that I forgot the syntax of that command and did not have time to look for it. I was working on the unit and came back the the good old SDMB a couple minutes later and my answer was waiting.
Desmostylus was right though about the situation. Brutus was right with the syntax and thanks for the quick reply.
Unfortunately it didnt fix the problem and I had to rebuild the system from scratch. I couldn’t access the WINNT dir from DOS because it was NTFS. I didn’t think it would work, but I had to try it. The repair console didn’t work either. It hosed everything up worse. I had to call 4 people at 3am to put the databases back together.
At work we make a dual-boot (on seperate partitions) of the OS on each server. The first boot is just the backup OS with basic service packs installed, and the second boot is our main production OS. If the loader/registry ever gets hosed on our production OS we can just boot into the backup OS and fix it up.
This does add an hour to the installation time of a server, but the potential reduction of downtime is well worth it.
You should really add this Dos help website to your bookmarks. For future reference. I mean, you must have to write the occassional batch file using dos commands, no?