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BOOT CAMP 114
INTRODUCING DOS, PART 2
Following on from our brief introduction to DOS in last week’s
Boot Camp, in part two we’re going to be looking at some basic commands and how
it could get you out of a fix following a fatal Windows crash. But first, how to
start your PC in DOS mode, as opposed to a DOS ‘session’ within Windows, which
we dealt with last week. The key difference between a DOS session and DOS mode
is that Windows isn’t running, in other words it could be the only way of
accessing files on your PC if Windows stopped working.
As we said last week DOS is very powerful so if you do not
feel completely confident leave it alone, nevertheless, it’s worth following the
rest of the article as DOS is still very much a part of Windows, and sooner or
later you will have need of it.
There are basically three ways to get a PC into DOS mode. The
first is from boot-up, switch on, wait a few moments for it to complete the POST
(power on self-test) sequence then before the ‘Starting Windows….’ Message appears
press the F8 key and select option 5 from the Windows Startup menu, ‘Command
Prompt only’. Method number two is to exit from Windows to DOS, click on the
Start button, then Shutdown and select ‘Restart in DOS’ mode. The third route
into DOS is when things go wrong and Windows won’t load and the PC defaults to
DOS, or nothing happens and you have to boot your machine using your PC’s Emergency
Recovery Disc or ERD. (You have made one, haven’t you? If not go immediately to
Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, select the Startup
Disc tab and follow the instructions).
When starting in DOS mode from boot up or after exiting Windows
you will see a black screen with some text and at the bottom you’ll see the
command line C:\> and a flashing cursor. The command line when you boot from
an emergency recovery disc will be A:\>. You can change disc drives by
typing the drive letter, followed by a colon, thus to change from floppy drive
A, to drive C type C: and press the Return key. You may or may not be able to
access your PC’s CD-ROM drive (usually drive D:), depending upon whether or not
the appropriate DOS driver has been loaded. To exit from DOS mode (provided no
programs are running) just switch the PC off, or type ‘win’, which will load
Windows.
The C:\ > prompt shows that you are in the ‘root directory’
of your PC’s hard disc drive, which contains the important system files that
configure the machine during boot-up, and all of the folders or directories containing
Windows and the programs loaded on your PC. The root of the C: drive is not a
very interesting place so we’ll use the change directory command to have a peek
inside the Windows folder on the C: drive. Type cd\windows and Return and the
command prompt changes to C:\WINDOWS>, showing that we are now inside the Windows
folder. In case you hadn’t already worked it out ‘cd’ stands for change
directory, and that kind of logical simplicity holds true for most DOS commands;
note also that you can use upper or lowercase for DOS commands and filenames.
Now we can use the dir (directory) command mentioned last
week, which tells the PC to display the contents of the current directory. Type
it in and see what happens. A long list of files and folders flashes past and
you probably won’t see much but you can tell DOS to display only one page at a
time by adding a ‘switch’ to the command, in this case /p (p for page), so his
time type dir /p and Return. You can also list the contents of the directory
alphabetically, by date, size and many other ways by adding a sort switch /o (sOrt)
followed by a second letter that tells DOS how to arrange the list. For example,
to list the files one page at a time in date order the command would be dir /p
/od, to list in order of size use the sort command switch /os for an
alphabetical listing use /on, and so on.
You may have noticed that file and folder names in DOS are
only 8 characters long, DOS shortens the longer file names used in Windows to
the first six characters followed by a tilde (~) and a number (normally 1,
unless there’s another file with the same first six letters). When naming files
you should use the DOS convention, i.e. as it appears on the screen.
You should now have enough information to be able to
navigate your way around your PC’s disc drives, so let’s put that knowledge to
some practical use with a simple exercise. We are going to use the DOS Copy
command to recover an important document by copying it to a floppy disc. If you
want to follow this example use Windows Explorer to open My Documents, go to
New on the File menu to create a new sub folder, rename it Office then use your
word processor to save a text file into the new folder and call it ‘meetings.doc’.
Boot the PC to DOS mode, in a real life situation that would probably mean using
your emergency recovery disc, if you use that method don’t forget to change the
drive letter from A: to C: remove the disc from the drive and insert a blank formatted
floppy. When using the Copy command DOS needs to know three things: the name of
the folder or sub folders the document is in -- also known as the ‘path’ -- the
name of the document or file and where you want it to go. If you use file names
of more than 8 characters remember those tildes and numbers. Thus the DOS command
to copy our important document from the hard disc to a floppy disc would be:
‘copy c:\mydocu~1\office\meetings.doc a:’
It probably looks more complicated than it is but try it a
couple of times with your own folders and documents and you’ll soon get the hang
of it. Next week we’ll round off this short series with some more handy DOS
commands and functions.
Next week – Introducing DOS, part 3
JARGON FILTER
DRIVER
A small program or data file that tells your PC how to communicate
with internal or external hardware such as a disc drive or printer
EMERGENCY RECOVERY DISC
A floppy disc created by Windows containing files that will
allow your PC to boot up in DOS mode, plus various tools and utilities to
assist recovery following a crash
SWITCH
An extra instruction (or instructions) added to the end of
DOS command
TOP TIP
In response to popular demand here’s another one of those ‘Easter
Eggs’, jokey little features hidden away by software programmers; this one
lives in Internet Explorer 5. On the Tools menu select Internet Options then the
General tab and click the Languages button. Select Add and in the User Defined field
type ‘ie-ee’ (minus the quote marks) then click OK. Highlight the entry and
click the Move Up button to put it at the top of the list. Select OK to close
the windows click on the Search icon and in the side menu you see a new set of options.
Select Previous Searches and follow the links on to the Internet to see the
guilty ones!
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