markz@microsoft.UUCP (Mark Zbiokowski) (08/31/83)
COMMAND.COM has an internal name from which it reloads itself. The
presence of COMSPEC is for subsequent invocations of COMMAND (i.e. a shell
escape). I suspect that you are attempting to load up a RAMDisk or a hard
disk (either being an installed device) with COMMAND and then have the
transient portiuon reloaded from there. Unfortunately, allowing a user to
change COMSPEC may result in a system hanging itself: if you point COMSPEC
at just any ol' file and clobber the transient, the resident portion does not
contain enough smarts to be able to prompt the user to change COMSPEC
"back".
The simplest solution for your problems is to have the following in your
AUTOEXEC on your boot disk:
COPY COMMAND.COM Z:\ (or whatever drive you want it on)
Z:
COMMAND Z:\ /P
The second COMMAND will eat about 2K of memory, but it allows itself to
be read off the supposedly faster media.