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 640×480, 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 1280×1024 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]
