When you first place a hard drive into a machine, you need to run fdisk. This is a menu driven application for partitioning a drive. It requires a reboot to complete.

Following an fdisk, you would typically run a “format ” Before formatting it is good to check fdisk and verify that your drive letter really is valid.

Dir is the command for list contents. You can list by type by specifying a parameter immediately following, like “dir autoexec.bat”. You can also use switches to find hidden and archived files or to separate the output by pages (“dir /p”). This command is a lot like the ls command in UNIX.

To change your current directory, use the cd command. To go backwards use “cd ..” (yes, there is a space after cd just like in UNIX). To go back to the root directory, type “cd \”.

To make folders, use the md command. The proper syntax to create a folder called i386 (typical name for Windows 2000 setup file directory) would be “md i386”

“Copy *.* c:\i386” – For this command, the * represents a wildcard. If I said *.exe, it would copy all executable files or autoexec.bat would just copy that one file. The syntax is such that it is “copy ”

From the i386 folder, run “winnt” if you want to start an installation of windows 2000.

Using these commands you can navigate through a file system in DOS and install windows 2000 or windows 98 (setup file is called setup) from scratch onto a new hard drive. Other usefull commands to know are

“Ipconfig /release” or /renew or /flushdns or /all– This command is especially nice b/c it gives you complete control over the DHCP status of your machine – only from 2000

“winipcfg” – Displays a GUI of the TCP IP stack – 98 only

“Arp –a” – This will show you a cached list of all machines that have connected to yours in the past few minutes

“delete ” – This command will, yes, you guessed it, delete files. Be wary, there is no trash… Gone means gone.

“winnt /sos” – When run from an i386 folder, this command will tell you why your 2k box isn’t booting sometimes.

“ping 127.0.0.1” – 127.0.0.1 is a loopback IP address. You’re just testing if your NIC works, but if you go in order, from NIC, to Router, to DNS servers, to a URL, you can pinpoint where your computer is receiving internet issues, if you’re having them.

“tracert ” – using this command, you can follow traffic per hop into specific locations. This can be especially helpful when isolating a connectivity issue. If often copy the results into an email and fire that off to an ISP to get them to resolve routing table issues )yes, those still friggin’ happen).

“sys a:” – Makes a bootable floppy (no CDROM drivers) – only from 98

“dcpromo” – adds a 2K server to a domain or creates a domain, or unjoins from a domain – 2K server only

“net use * //server/volume” – map the next available (once again using the * as a wildcard) drive letter to that volume on that server

“net use z: /delete” – delete’s that network drive

“xcopy *.* destination /e” The beauty of this little comman is that it gives the user the ability to transfer subdirectories, a feature not part of copy. The /d switch will copy only changed files. The /y files will copy without asking for verification. Xcopy is not always available.

Start and stop are the final ones. These I use rarely, but you can use them to kill a process (like the kill statement in UNIX)

Anyway, just thought the Mac users would like some commands. If you want