Can a DOS PC boot without COMMAND.COM?

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#806

From: Sylvia Schwartz
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 00:00

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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is not a problem, just a mystery that has been bothering me.

Recently on powering on one of our lab computers, I saw a message "Bad or
missing command interpreter". It's a familiar message in public computer
labs: COMMAND.COM had been erased or corrupted. I was walking away to grab
a back-up disk when I realized that the computer was continuing to boot up
normally. But how???

I checked to make sure that COMMAND.COM was really missing, and typed
DIR/AH to make sure it hadn't been given the "hidden" attribute. There
was a copy of COMMAND.COM in the DOS directory, but CONFIG.SYS had a
shell command specifying that COMMAND.COM was to be found in the root
directory.

When I restored COMMAND.COM to the root directory by copying it from \DOS,
the computer booted without the error message, but I was able to reproduce
the situation for the benefit of a skeptical colleague by deleting it
again.

The computer is a Gateway 486DX-33 running DOS 6.0. It has a network
connection and Windows, but is set to boot in stand-alone mode to the C:
prompt.

Can anyone tell me how this PC was able to recover from what (in my
previous experience) ought to be a fatal error? Thanks.


Sylvia Schwartz                     sylvias@saturn.caps.maine.edu
Director, Academic Computer Center
Westbrook College
Portland, Maine

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From: Sylvia Schwartz <sylvias@saturn.caps.maine.edu>
Subject: Can a DOS PC boot without COMMAND.COM?
Date: 1996/01/11
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