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Ping, IPConfig, Format, Netstat, etc. Not Recognized as Commands

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by link470 1 view

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Hi everyone. So most of you would think right away it's a path issue, it's not as far as I can see.

The other day I was playing a really lame game on my system, tried the game out. It was called kitty luv [I know, before anyone says, yes, I played a stupid game called kitty luv, and no it wasn't from some advertisement or filled with spyware. I protect my system better then that, it was a legit game that worked before]. Now I've heard reports that this game was bad in crashing, but I had no idea it was this bad. It took down my fully patched XP machine that I haven't had fail on me for 3 and a half years. It's been running the same Windows install and performing great. However this game knocked it down, to the point of restarting the computer, booting it up at 640x480, and clearing my Windows Activation. You seen the movie That Darn Cat? It was much worse. You know how bad it sucked telling my system admin friends that Kitty Luv took down my PC and killed the activation? I was in shock when I rebooted and it said I had 3 days to activate because my hardware had significantly changed [which made no sense because device manager showed everything the exact same as before, all devices correctly listed and all drivers installed].

I've never seen it that bad. Scanned for viruses, it wasn't that. It was just the game had terrible TERRIBLE programming.

But anyways, after a few restarts I managed to get it back to 1280x1024 the way I like it, and my dual monitor setup back the way I like it. Windows activated itself over the internet just fine and resumed working, to my relief. Everything seemed back to normal, however I tried to ping another machine in my house, just at the normal start>run>CMD c:\documents and settings\NAME> prompt, and it gave me 'Ping' Is not recognized as an internal or external command.

At first, I thought I'd typed it wrong, but I tried that again, tried format, netstat, ipconfig, and a few others. None worked. So the first step of course was to check my path in system properties. Everything was there correctly, starting with system and system 32 under the %system root% wildcard and correctly showing up as C for system root when called upon. Then I made sure that the path appeared correctly when I typed in PATH into CMD. It worked, got the same result as I did in system properties.

Next step, again, an obvious one for us sysadmins, was to check the system folder itself for ping.exe, netstat, ipconfig, etc. They all resided in their correct folders.

Step 3, navigate to that folder in CMD, and get the C:\system\system32> prompt, and try the commands there. They worked great, netstat worked, I could format a floppy I had lying around, and I could ping the machine I was trying to ping earlier when I discovered this issue. Everything looked great.

So I restarted the machine a couple times hoping it was just that the path didn't initialize correctly. This also didn't seem to be the case, restarting didn't help.

Google didn't help, since the first 10 billion results are all people going "oh great! I know that issue, it's your system path of course!".....no.

So now I come to you. Thanks guys, hope to hear a reply soon!

Take care.

[LINK470]

4 replies

by churdoo

Kitty Luv?? MEOW! LMAO! Come on, I had to do that! In fact, you've peaked my curiosity and I want to find the game and see what it's about. NOT!

Seriously, it sounds like you've done all the steps of someone with some experience, the next test that I didn't see you mention, is ...

Go back to a CMD prompt and CD to the dir where said commands reside. Test the commands again so you're sure that they work in this instance of the shell, CD to a different path, and then MANUALLY reset your path within the CMD shell to JUST the dir where said commands reside. i.e., at the prompt, enter
PATH c:\windows\system32
and I would use "c:\windows" instead of %systemroot%, and then once you've re-created and simplified your PATH, test the commands after CD'ing to a different directory.

If the commands work in this test, then something happened to your PATH, and you can re-type it in your system properties. (perhaps non-displaying character(s) are at the front of the path that stop the processing).

If the game can womp all over your devices in your registry, it can also womp on your environment variables, and who knows what else it may have womped on? So having said that, Is system restore to a prior point in time (pre-kitty) an option?

Good luck!

by animatech

I might add to try and fun chdsk /f/r or Go to start > run type in cmd then type in sfc /scannow and let it run.
To read more go to http://tinyurl.com/27yk7
And you will need the windows CD for that

by slybuddy

The problem most probably is an incorrect system environment variables set for "Path".

Navigate to System Properties

Advanced..

Environment variables...

In 'System variables' navigate to 'Path' and verify or add the following default values,

First i would recommend that you backup in notepad for e.g the existing statement before altering anything here.

For e.g, an incorrect statement system variable for "Path" would be;

Drive:\Windows\System32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\

Change it to;
C:\Windows\System32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\

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