Commands given on this page and other Pages on Dos are based on MS Dos 6.2. There were several versions of dos before this one, and probably a few after this one. MS - Dos is an Acronym for Micrsoft Disk Operating System. Generally you get to the window to issue Dos commands by going to Start | Run | cmd Ms Dos is in effect a collection of computer programs stored on your Hard Disk Drive.

We will start straight away with how to see the structure of your files, that could be all your file on your computer.

See Your Files Issue this command dir

notice there is no semi colon or full collon or anything after the characters dir. you can of course issue the command with some so called switches defined by you, nearly all ms - dos commands have switches, you may know them you may want to learn them from this page right now!!

Example dir /w/p

Above we have used two switched w and p. the w switch setts out the output of your files in several columns across the page, rather than presenting the entire list vertically, and the p switch will allow the output of the results to be displayed accros multilpe pages. If you have hundreds of files in a directory you will soon see the benifit of this.

Check Out that My Disk is Ok Issue this command chkdsk

This command will display some usfull information as well. you will see something like this:

The type of file system is fat.

Volume XPHOME created 1/9/2003

Volume Serial Number 2D57-12Y6

The dos command will verify the files and folders and then report files that it has a problem with, it may say something like:

\windows\Prefetch\CMD.exe-oc68978.pf first allocation unitis not valid the entrey will be truncated.

Convert lost chains to files (y/n)?

If it asks this say yes. Notice it may not be exactly this same file name, and it may find no files that is has a problem with. It may display the following:

76,989,6778 KB total disk space

1,170,567 KB in 2,456 hidden files.

256,960 KB in 7950 folders.

28,990,456 KB in files.

45,456,567 KB available.

Ok, look these figures above are made up, the point is that it will display some thing very much like this.

You may wish to issue a slightly diffrent command chkdsk /f

This command may report

The type of file system is FAT32.

Cannot lock current drive. Chkdsk cannot run because volume is in use by another process. would you like to schedual this volume to be checked next time the system resrtarts (Y /N) Choose Yes. The switch /f makes the program try to fix problems, especially where there are files with lost allocation units.

Here is a tip: if you have ran chkdsk /f and you have asked to convert the the lost chains to files you will be able to find these files and you may be able to read them as well. These files will be in the root of your main dive, for most of you that means the root of drive C. You will see files like this: FILE0000.CHK OR SIMILAR, essentially the files end in .chk These are recovered file fragments. If you want to look at what they contain you may be able to; the command chkdsk is very powerful, there are other switched apart from the /f switch. the / f switch will make the program try to identify any lost allocation units, and give you the option to attempt to recover them.

Looking inside a file

If you are in the same directory as the file fragment type in this command type file0000.chk where file0000.chk is the file name of the file you do want to read. Dos may be able to display its Content on the screen. the command is type followed by a space then the file name.

You want to create a new directory The command you need is MD or you can type in the command MKDIR Yep strangely there are two commands that effectively do the same thing. Therefore say you want to create a directory called myfiles, you type in MD myfiles