Hi,

The Dos prompt or command prompt is simply where you type the next command
that you want the OS to operate.
It means the system is ready and waiting for yuor input.

If she made a boot disk, that simply allows her to boot up the system and
have the OS ready to do it's thing.
She has to tell the OS what that thing is to do.  If she is booting off a
floppy then it is going to be at the A: prompt.  She needs to change to the
C: prompt to run from the hard drive.

If she is looking for it (the boot disk) to run programs automatically on
boot up, that is where in the MS world, the Config.sys and the AutoExec.bat
files come into play.  The Config.sys file was used to load the necessary
drivers the system needed and the Autoexec.bat file loads the programs you
want to run in the order that you want them loaded.  If they are blank, the
OS is simply at a booted state and the system may not be ready to perform
all it's functions properly.

If she is typing a command and the return message is "bad command or file
not found", that means that the command she gave (program she wants to run)
is not in the directory that the OS is in, nor is it in the search path the
OS uses to locate such commands.

The Path is one of the things that you set up in the config.sys file.  IE.
path=c:\; c:\dos; c:\windows.
which means that the OS, after looking in the present directory that it is
in, then looks in the root direcotry (c:\), then the Dos directory (c:\dos)
and then the windows directory (c:\windows) for the command that was
entered on the command line. It will perfom the fuction as soon as it finds
it and then stop looking.  If no path is set up it looks only in the
directory it is presently located in.




At 11:39 PM 01/06/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>my cuzzen wants to know what is the dos promt??when trying to install
windows,she went a made a boot disk off line and when she runs it it stops
at the a promt and i thought it was to go d:/ setup and enter but it keeps
coming back saying bad comaned??is it mybe a bad boot disk i had  her go
trough a fdisk and it dont seem to be putting in the cd rom drivers?? any
help would be great and thank you ahead of time listers, and keep it fun
out there guys gals jerry the fatboy crider

Thanks,

Joe

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