How did this happen

This time I go to look at it and all that appears on the screen is text
that says himem.sys is missing, and several other dos-like messages
complaining about missing memory. Windows does not load. When I type
DIR, all I see is command.com. That's all that it shows is on the hard
drive. I'm thinking that somehow she deleted everything except that one
file. I ask her is she removed or unplugged anything, she says no. I
ask if she did anything in the settings, she says no, and says all she
did was turn off the computer.

I go into the Bios and discover that the settings show no installed hard
drives. I reset them to "Auto" and reboot the computer. It boots up,
XP loads, and everything is fine except that she has a bright red screen
with red text, so nothing can be read. I change the display to the
standard default XP settings and everything works fine again.

Well, obviously she was screwing with the thing to make the screen
unreadable, not to mention she has the START button text-font so large
it's chewing up 10% of the screen.

Anyhow, my question is this:
If the harddrive was not being accessed, due to improper bios settings,
how the heck did it show a DIR of C:\command.com (and nothing more). How
was it reading the hard drive at all?

By

A friend asked me to come over last weekend to fix his wife's
computer. This is not the first time she screwed that thing up. Let
me put it nicely, but honestly. The woman has a few screws loose in
her brain. I'm not just saying this, because she is under treatment
for mental illness. Anyhow, she has a computer with XP, which she
only uses to play the 4 or 5 games that come with XP. That's all she
uses it for. But whne it breaks, she goes into the bios, gets into
the system, and even takes parts out of the computer.

The last time it broke, she went bonkers, and he asked me to fix it to
calm her down because she was pacing the floor and bitching, and
threatening to throw the computer thru a window. That time there was
a legitimate problem, the cpu cooler fan died and was causing it to
overheat and shut down. I replaced the fan and it worked again.

This time I go to look at it and all that appears on the screen is
text that says himem.sys is missing, and several other dos-like
messages complaining about missing memory. Windows does not load.
When I type DIR, all I see is command.com. That's all that it shows
is on the hard drive. I'm thinking that somehow she deleted
everything except that one file. I ask her is she removed or
unplugged anything, she says no. I ask if she did anything in the
settings, she says no, and says all she did was turn off the computer.

I go into the Bios and discover that the settings show no installed
hard drives. I reset them to "Auto" and reboot the computer. It
boots up, XP loads, and everything is fine except that she has a
bright red screen with red text, so nothing can be read. I change
the display to the standard default XP settings and everything works
fine again.

Well, obviously she was screwing with the thing to make the screen
unreadable, not to mention she has the START button text-font so large
it's chewing up 10% of the screen.

Anyhow, my question is this:
If the harddrive was not being accessed, due to improper bios
settings, how the heck did it show a DIR of C:\command.com (and
nothing more). How was it reading the hard drive at all?

By the way, I considered the system battery to have failed, but she
insisted she replaced it "around christmas".

I should also mention that this Dell computer is a Pentium 4, dual
core, with 4 gigs of Ram. All that power, just to play the games
that comes with XP. Yet, the computer runs slower than a turtle. My
own 1000mhz Pentium 3 with 500megs Ram, running Windows 98se and
Win2000 (dual boot), runs 50 times faster, and it's loaded with
programs. Why her computer runs so horribly slow is beyond me, but I
was not going to mess with it. As long as she can play her games,
she's happy. From what I saw in the bios, things appear to be set
normally, and while I was there I disabled the password requirement
that she had set and did not need or want.

Just for grins, to show how goofy this woman is, she asked me to
install another game. I told her to give me the CD with the game.
She said she dont have one. So I ask if she has it on a flash stick,
or floppy NOPE. So I say "how can I install it if you dont have
it?" She replies, "cant you just make it?".. DUH !!!!!
(And she insists there is no way to get internet, not even dialup,
because her satellite tv company told her its not available)

arive... the only thing I can think of is that
this computer has a ROM. Lots of computers did this years ago (but not
IBM-PC clones), like IBM-PC, Apple, Commodore, etc. The IBM-PC case, if
it couldn't find a floppy or a hard drive, it would boot Basic from a
separate ROM on the motherboard. But this was the 80's and by the 90's
those ROM based OS sort of disappeared.

IBM like machines (x86) all use BIOS (so does CP/M btw). This makes a
common OS to run on many different kinds of computer configurations much
easier (which is just like a ROM, but today is flashable). And a BIOS is
like a mini OS. And it is indeed possible to include a mini DOS in with
a BIOS (although I never saw one like this). And if the BIOS can't find
a drive to boot from, then instead boot a DOS found in the BIOS instead.
And I would be curious what drive letter that Command.com was found
under? And I would have typed a VER command to see what kind of DOS and
version it was.

The last time it broke, she went bonkers, and he asked me to fix it to
calm her down because she was pacing the floor and bitching, and
threatening to throw the computer thru a window. That time there was a
legitimate problem, the cpu cooler fan died and was causing it to
overheat and shut down. I replaced the fan and it worked again...

I should also mention that this Dell computer is a Pentium 4, dual core,
with 4 gigs of Ram. All that power, just to play the games that comes
with XP. Yet, the computer runs slower than a turtle. My own 1000mhz
Pentium 3 with 500megs Ram, running Windows 98se and Win2000 (dual
boot), runs 50 times faster, and it's loaded with programs. Why her
computer runs so horribly slow is beyond me, but I was not going to mess
with it.

On 04/16/2012 04:34 PM, BillW50 wrote:

arive... the only thing I can think of is that
this computer has a ROM. Lots of computers did this years ago (but
not IBM-PC clones), like IBM-PC, Apple, Commodore, etc. The IBM-PC
case, if it couldn't find a floppy or a hard drive, it would boot
Basic from a separate ROM on the motherboard. But this was the 80's
and by the 90's those ROM based OS sort of disappeared.

IBM like machines (x86) all use BIOS (so does CP/M btw). This makes a
common OS to run on many different kinds of computer configurations
much easier (which is just like a ROM, but today is flashable). And
a BIOS is like a mini OS. And it is indeed possible to include a
mini DOS in with a BIOS (although I never saw one like this). And if
the BIOS can't find a drive to boot from, then instead boot a DOS
found in the BIOS instead. And I would be curious what drive letter
that Command.com was found under? And I would have typed a VER
command to see what kind of DOS and version it was.

Don't think I saw anything newer than an 8088 boot to ROM BASIC