Problems with MS DOS V5.00 and COMMAND.COM & Novell Netware V3.11 & 2.2
1991 Laing Electronics Inc. Douglass Laing
1st problem seen was with an ARCNET lan card and boot rom.
- create a boot floppy with MS DOS V5.0 on it.
- put the network shells on (ipx & NET5 or NETX)
- test it in a unit with a floppy to make sure it works.
- DOSGEN it, and rplfix.
Diskless work station will boot DOS, then run ipx, net5, and allow
you to login to the network. When LOGIN.EXE exits you get a message
as follows:
Invalid COMMAND.COM
Cannot load COMMAND, system halted.
We tried several different Arcnet lan cards, boot roms, and settings (INT,
I/O and RAM). All gave the same response except the Novell RX-NET boot
rom (Remote reset V2.1, PN#817-234-020 REV A), it hung after loading
IPX and NET5. We also downloaded the latest IPX and NETX files from
Netwire, they gave the same results.
We tested an NE2000 lan card with boot rom, it worked just fine??? Or
at least we thought it did.
2nd problem MS DOS V5.00 again, LOGIN.EXE V3.58, and NO EXTRA ENVIRONMENT.
- If login.exe tries to set more environment than there is space for,
you will get the same Invalid COMMAND.COM system halted message as
above.
- If you give the system more environment (shell=command.com /e:800/p)
the problems seems to go away.
- If you change the LOGIN.EXE to V3.08 the problem also seems to go
away.
3rd problem MS DOS V5.00 again, and some programs.
- Upon exiting some programs you will get the same Invalid COMMAND.COM
system halted message.
All three problems have been seen on four different customers networks and on our own in house network. In the case of the customers we have moved them back to MS DOS 3.3a.
Common to all 5 networks:
Only two copies of COMMAND.COM on the network as follows.
SYS:PUBLICIBMMSDOSV3.30COMMAND.COM (25,308kb 02-02-88 12:00am)
SYS:PUBLICIBMMSDOSV5.00COMMAND.COM (47,845kb 04-09-91 5:00am)
the second V5.00 command.com is the same size and date as the boot
immage or floppy/hard drive.
the S2: search drive is set to the above path as follows
MAP ROOT S2:=SYS:PUBLIC%SMACHINE%OS%OS_VERSION
COMSPEC = S2:COMMAND.COM
when you type SET at the dos prompt the COMSPEC=Y:COMMAND.COM
If you type COMMAND from any ware on the network, it loads a
copy of command.com with the proper message. You can then type
EXIT without any errors.
In the 3rd problem listed above if you first type COMMAND in the
same directory as the file that gives the error on exit, command
will load another copy without any error.