DOS Commands under XP Pro
 

For many a year, I've had an "automatic" backup routine on my PC. The most recent version copies my important stuff to a hard drive on the server up in the attic. The previous version (also still used for "belt and braces") copies to a large separate hard drive on the main PC.

I discovered to my horror the other day that neither of these two has been working for some time. Fortunately, nothing important is lost.

It took me a lot longer to find out why this is so. If I opened a "DOS box" (I know they aren't called that under XP, but you know what I mean) and typed almost any command, even "help", I'd get an error message. Only a very few commands worked.

The problem is that XP has moved chunks of the key stuff to C:\Windows\System32 where it used to be in C:\Windows\Command.

Only a little change, but XP on my machine hadn't updated the "PATH=" statement to include System32, so it can't find itself. The first line of my batch files is now a PATH= statement, and they work fine.

I wonder if I should edit that thing called AUTOEXEC.BAT?

I pass this on, in case anyone else has had the problem and is wondering what's up.

Try right clicking 'my computer' select properties, select advanced, select environment variables and look for path in there.

Hmmm - interesting. Hadn't been there before. There's no PATH in there, though.

However, editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and ,DOS to include c:\Windows\System32 in the path has fixed the problem, and my backup batch files work again like a dream.