Last night I was cleaning out some old, duplicated files and shut down. This morning I rebooted, my IBM 486sx ran through the POST and got to "starting MS DOS", then thereafter just froze on a blinking cursor. Evidently it couldnt start DOS. I tinkered until I got the configuration screen up so I ran a recovery disk, which seemed to restore everything. New problem is, C: prompt recognizes commands but will not recognize or run files (example: C:\>win or C:\>windows,etc). Only result in this case is "bad filename or command" message. DOSSHELL and all other DOS utilities run fine, just cant open windows or anything else. The files are still there, just cant get DOS to recognize them. Thanks for helpful suggestions.

I forgot to mention, the IBM is running DOS 6.3

Sounds like your autoexec.bat file has been deleted or changed. You need to have a path statement in the autoexec.bat file in order for windows to work properly. The path statement tells DOS where to look for files if it can't readily find it. The autoexec.bat file is one of the startup boot files. DOS always looks for it in the c:\ directory (sometimes called the root directory.

From a DOS prompt, type the DOS command "path" it should display something like:

path=c:\windows;c:\windows\system;c:\dos;c:\

If it doesn't have your windows directory in the path statement then Windows will not run.

make sure the path command, as given above, is in your c:\autoexec.bat file. Of course, this assumes that DOS and Windows are the correct directories in your computer.

You can use edit.com to alter the contents of autoexec.bat

Note, if your c:\config.sys file is also missing, you'll still have problems. Windows needs the following statement

device=himem.sys

to be in the c:\config.sys file in order for Windows to work correctly.