🚀 go-pugleaf

klliou@milton.u.washington.edu (Kan-Lee Liou) writes:

>When I wanted to format a system disk on my 386sx-20, I kept getting the
>message which asked me to insert the DOS disk into drive A.
>Is there any way to fix it other than reformating my hard disk drive?
>(format a: /s was used)

>Kan, Seattle

The trick is to have a copy of COMMAND.COM in the root directory of
your hard disk. For some reason FORMAT ignores the COMSPEC variable
and only looks for COMMAND.COM (which it wants to copy to the floppy
disk being formatted) in the root directory of the boot disk.

At least this works for me. I had all DOS files (including COMMAND.COM)
in a subdir C:\DOS, but in order to use FORMAT/S I had to move COMMAND.COM
to C:\. Yuck!

Hope this helps, bye
 Erik, Amsterdam
--
|  Erik Tamboer       o  |  "You know, there are many people in the  |
|  tamboer@cs.vu.nl  <\  |  country today who,  through no fault of  |
|  .    .   .  . .. />   |  their own, are sane."  - Arthur Belling  |