Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!acad!daved
From: daved@acad.UUCP (Dave Duchesneau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: puzzler
Message-ID: <269@acad.UUCP>
Date: 8 Dec 89 01:19:59 GMT
References: <9205@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: daved@acad.UUCP (Dave Duchesneau)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Autodesk Inc., Sausalito, Calif. USA
Lines: 35

In article <9205@hoptoad.uucp> shell@hoptoad.UUCP (Shelly Culbertson) writes:
>
> (stuff deleted)
>	I happen to have on hand a Falcon DOS 3.1 system disk.  I can boot
>the computer with this in drive A.  Then I can use Xtree to check out the
>hard disk.  I don't have a photographic memory (in my head, that is), but
>everything looks about the same as it always has.  Autoexec.bat is there,
>the path is there, command.com is there (of course they're there, I've
>never had any reason to mess with them).  Once the computer has booted up,
>I can remove the disk from drive A and run it as I am accustomed to from
>the hard disk.  It just won't boot from drive C alone (even though it always
>did before and I didn't consciously change anything....).
>
>(more stuff deleted)
>
>Shelly Culbertson		shell@hoptoad.UUCP	voice: (707) 839-2265
>
>"Fax me a donut!"  -- Phil Spector

If the DOS floppy you have is the same DOS as what your hard disk's
formatted with, you might be able to repair it simply by booting from
the floppy, and entering "sys c:", which recopies the two hidden DOS
boot files back to the hard disk. (They're usually IBMBIO.COM and
IBMDOS.COM if you want to look at 'em with Xtree). And if this doesn't
fix it, it at least shouldn't do any further damage. If you get an error
"not enough room for system on destination" or somesuch, you probably
don't have the same DOS version on floppy as on the hard disk. If the "sys"
*does* work, you should then copy COMMAND.COM from the floppy to C:\, and
copy all the other DOS files from the floppy to wherever DOS lives on the
hard disk, just to be *sure* that the DOS you boot from is the same as
the DOS whose, say, CHKDSK you'll use.

Hope it works....
Dave Duchesneau
daved@acad.com