Paul said:
Hi Folks,
I've somehow converted my Windows-XP disk drive, a single partition to
a NTFS. Don't know how, but it appears that my DOS path commands
cannot be seen, or cannot function.
Can I do anything, besides converting back to FAT32, to allow me to
run this nifty little DOS program that needs to use the path commands
to visit the library?
Please?
Paul
Sorry, you can not convert from NTFS to FAT. Unless you copy all files on a
NTFS volume back to a FAT volume. But, I have good news (no, this is not an
insurance commercial).
Please assure that you've set a System Restore point before changing things.
Your PATH is an "environment variable" and you can change environment
variables. Right click My Computer, select Properties, select the Advanced
tab, and click the Environment variables button. You can edit things here,
note that there are 2 boxes for adding and editing variables - one for the
current User account and one that is system wide. Setting for the current
user will over-ride a system wide one. For example, I changed my TEMP and
TMP variables to point back to C:\TEMP (after I created a folder in the root
of drive C and named it TEMP), but only for a particular User account (it's
not a system wide change).
Your old DOS program may be running into a limit of how many characters can
be in a path (128 is the absolute limit, not 256, for old Dos). You can use
compact environment settings, such as "C:\%something%\" which might really
stand for "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\something\" and that can
be a problem with old DOS programs that get the translation that ends up
equating to more than 128 characters (or maybe the program doesn't even
understand the %x% type of notation). Create the equivalent of much shorter
environment variables that the program is looking for, but only for the User
account that will use it.
Did that help, or just confuse?
