On Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 3:55 PM, Karen Lewellen <klewel...@shellworld.net> wrote: > Thanks to you Dennis, and john for this suggestion. > The thing is that the file is command.com
You should have mentioned that earlier. What is the problem you are encountering that requires you to overwrite it? > I noticed at the computer help source indicates that there is a system atrib > option as well. granted I will check the options with my edition of atrib, > still it might work I have more than one hard drive, with more than one > copy of command.com for the same Dos edition. IIRC, the system attribute is on for the actual DOS files - MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS (or IBMDOS.COM and IBMBIO.COM in the PC-DOS flavor.) I don't believe it's on for COMMAND.COM. That may be read only, but not hidden. (And I don't recall it being read-only. I used to use ATTRIB to apply read-only attributes to various DOS commands, but that was habit and being fussy, and not an actual requirement. It was just a way of preventing accidental "oops!" moments.) > As I write I have no idea how my machine is running, it rebooted by > accident and I barely got in again. > Staying with amazing friends, but I have no access to a monitor. > I have norton utilities 8.0, last edition for dos on a drive that seems > undamaged. so I hope I can make a rescue disc of some kind before too much > mayhem happens. The way command.com works, when it's loaded, a resident stub installs at the top of memory, and a transient interpreter is loaded below. When you run a program from DOS, the transient interpreter is overwritten to provide more memory. When the program is exited, the resident portion reloads the transient interpreter. (There's a CONFIG.SYS option usable to specify the location of the command interpreter is it doesn't happen to be COMMAND.COM in trhe root of the boot drive. If you have it available, I think you should be able to load 4DOS or the FreeDOS version of COMMAND from the existing instance, do what you need to do with ATTRIB from there, and then exit. > Thanks again, > Kare ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
