weird... trouble booting into windows

[eyor]

Hi,
I finally decided to ask about this. For some reason my computer suddenly decided it could not find win.com, and just boots to the C:\ prompt in dos with an error message about win.com. I have been doing 'cd windows' then 'win', which seems to work well enough, but it is a pain. What could my problem possibly be? I have tried moving win.com around, but that just makes the computer really mad!
Thanks!

 

[obenton]

Open c:\msdos.sys in Notepad and make sure the first few lines include:

[Paths]
WinDir=C:\WINDOWS
WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS

[Options]
BootGUI=1

 

[eyor]

hmmm... there were two copies:
1 found in C:\ which contained:
[Paths]
WinDir=c:\windows
WinBootDir=c:\windows
HostWinBootDrv=c

[Options]
BootMulti=1
BootGUI=1
DoubleBuffer=1

and one found in C:\windows\ :
[Paths]
WinDir=C:\WINDOWS
WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS
HostWinBootDrv=C

[Options]
BootMulti=0
BootGUI=1
DoubleBuffer=1

Would "bootmulti" be of any significance(sp?)?
Thanks

 

[obenton]

bootmulti=1 indicates that it is a dual boot system (w2k and win98, for instance), and causes boot control to be turned over to boot.ini, the boot menu from which you select the OS, instead of win.com, which boots win98. Since you apparently don't have a dual boot system, edit msdos.sys in Notepad and change the bootmulti value to zero. I would guess that when boot is unable to find boot.ini, it is set to default to the command prompt, rather then allow the computer to freeze. BootGUI=1 causes boot to execute win.com, which gives you the desktop interface - change the value to zero and you'd get the command prompt.

 

[Nick Stone]

For some unknown reason, some networked machines will react this way especially if a new (improberly programed???) program is installed.
One solution is to add "C:/windows" in your path statement in Autoexec.bat and if necessary add "Win" to the last line of AEB.