Opening DOS

This is DOS for real emergencies, like when the registry is so messed up there’s nothing much to do except format the whole hard disk. But there’s info you need to retrieve.  So, I taught myself DOS.  

How to get into it.

Powerup the computer... and while it’s working its way around, like within the first 2 seconds press f2, or delete, or whatever it is is necessary until the whole computer goes quiet and this thing stares at you from the black screen

C:\>

This is Dos.  First thing to note is to pay attention to the \ and the >
The former tells you where you are, the latter asks you where you want to go. That’s my take anyway. Dos is not case sensitive, so any case will do.

C is your hardrive.  To see what’s in it type
DIR
which will be followed by a strong shower of letters which you can’t read. To control the shower, type
DIR/W    (OR)
DIR/P

There will be names of files and folders and subdirectories... to go to subdirectories or folders, type eg. windows

c:\>cd windows

This tells Dos to go into the directory (cd) windows which will lead you to

c:\windows>

see the > comes after windows which means “Now that you’re in windows, where do you want to go today?”  

Imagine you have a directory called mydocs then type

c:\windows>cd mydocs

which will lead you to

c:\windows\mydocs>

type in dir/w (OR dir/p) to see what’s in it.  Suppose there’s a file called blog.txt then and you want to read it, then type

c:\windows\mydocs\type blog.txt

but before you press enter, stand by the PAUSE key ‘cos another verbal shower awaits you. If you don’t press PAUSE you won’t read a thing.

To go back one level on directory type

c:\windows\mydocs\cd..

to go back to root directory, type

c:\windows\mydocs\cd\

which will take you back to

c:\>

Here are some commands.  

Copy blog.txt to a: drive

c:\windows\mydocs\copy blog.txt a:

Delete blog.txt

c:\windows\mydocs\del blog.txt

The objective here is to save files, so you probably want to practise the COPY command. If your files are too big, then use PKZIP for DOS.  But don’t expect me to teach you anything, cos’ I’m still learning.

Useful DOS site:
http://dos.rsvs.net/index1.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/
(check out his Dos tutorial)

http://www.jegsworks.com/Lessons/index.html
(Look under Dos basics section)