welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we're talking about super
secret commands for DOS these are commands that Microsoft doesn't want you
to know about and I'm gonna spill the beans right after this let's start with
a quick example as discussed previously if you type in a command like ver
followed by slash question mark you'll get a description of the command like so
this may show the command syntax and any switches that are available however this
does not display all of the switches dirty pool as we see here ver does not
have a parameter however if you type in verse /r you get some additional
information about the version of das we now see the revision and that dose is in
the low memory area this could be useful if you need to verify if das is loaded
high or not Minnie dos commands have secret switches there are a few possible
reasons for this if the help switch output needs to scroll it would be hard
to read making it less user-friendly you would have to use the pipe symbol with
the more descriptor to read the output one page at a time if you need to scroll
back up and check the syntax you would have to type the command again there are
some switches we will cover that will make it easier to accidentally delete
files or it could otherwise change the normal function of the command this may
also be why there secret we have another innocuous switch this one is for the
copy command it's more of a parameter than a switch but it's still super
secret so I'm including it in this video
adding a period after the copy command means the same thing as typing asterisk
after ik well this is documented for other commands it's not a listed switch
or syntax for the copy command similarly typing a comma after the der
command will display all files even hidden ones if you are interested in
learning more about changing file attributes here's a card next we have F
disk this sounds like something you might say in frustration when setting up
a PC but it's a tool used to partition the hard drive as we see here there are
no listed switches in the help file for F disk however there are several
available starting with status this will output a screen similar to option 4 for
partition information but includes extended partitions as well then we have
slash MBR which I will not execute here it writes a new Master Boot Record to
the drive using the switch can cause problems with boot loaders but may fix
boot sector viruses this is one secret that can cause data loss so proceed with
caution we also have a switch here for creating a partition of a specific size
without going into F disk the syntax is f disk followed by the drive number
which in this case is 1 then slash PRI for primary and a colon then the size of
the partition we would like to create 2048 is a 2gig partition earlier I
mentioned changing the normal function of a command we can do that with command
comm itself say you go to copy files to a floppy but there's no disc in the
drive you will get an error like this
let's type in commands comm /f now that we have the /f switch active let's see
what happens when we try copying the files again as you'll see instead of
having to press the F key each time we are prompted to abort retry or fail it
just assumes fail each time this is really helpful if you're like me and
never remember to put a disc in the drive before copying files last but not
least let's go into our config dot Sue's file here we have DOS equals hi we can
add a question mark before the equals sign that way we will be prompted if we
want to load dass hi every time the computer starts this may be useful if
you are working with windows 2.0 because loading das in the high memory area may
cause problems with the operating system loading EMM 386 also has a super secret
switch some systems hang when EMM 386 starts a detection process for the
presence of a token ring network adapter the switch no TR or no token ring will
disable the detection process of course do not use the switch if you plan on
setting up a token ring network that is all the super secret beans that I have
for today don't forget to subscribe for more great content every Thursday thanks
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