Hello

I have an IBM Thinkpad 755cx with a dual boot of Windows 3.11 and 95a. I installed 95a after Windows 3.11. There is no autoexec.bat files in the 95 partition and when booting, it reads from the 3.11 one. They system still boots and works, but it encounters loads of errors whilst starting up and runs programs that aren't installed in 95.

So how do i change the path of autoexec.bat in Windows 95?


Thanks!

I would hex-edit something that reads that, and change it to a different file name, but I don't know what that file is.

Just a question; couldn't you use Windows 95a's built-in dual-boot mechanism to switch between 95's and 3.11's autoexec.bat? I'm a bit puzzled why it didn't set that up from the beginning, actually.

Windows 95 is not NT, it doesn't have boot loader like that one.

It can however dual-boot between itself and a previous version of DOS (I presume one is there because of 3.11). I know that because I have a setup like this here.

If you just want to move the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to a different location, I would first move the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to where you want it. Then, I would create a new AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the root directory, and set it to read the actual AUTOEXEC.BAT file. The only drawback here is that when using the option to examine each command (known as "Step by Step Configuration" in Windows 95 and later), it may just detect the single command to run the real AUTOEXEC.BAT file, and not any of the individual commands contained within it.

If what you want is to have two seperate AUTOEXEC.BAT files for each Windows installation, however, then I suggest you to use Windows 95's capability of maintaining two seperate versions of MS-DOS. Make changes to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the one version that relate to the one Windows installation, and then do the same while in the other version, only be sure to set it up for the other Windows installation.

If that's not possible, then I would create two seperate .BAT files that can both play the role of a proper AUTOEXEC.BAT, and when booting up, either execute the one for Windows 3.1, or execute the other for Windows 95.

@WinPC

That is what I want! I want 2 different autoexec.bat files for 95 and 3.11. How would i go about changing the files? Thanks!

Unless you were to use the "Previous version of MS-DOS" feature in Windows 95 (there should be some information about it online, as well as how to enable it, but I haven't looked), I would make sure that no file is actually named AUTOEXEC.BAT. Rather, I would give both copies two different names, and when booting into Windows 3.11, execute the one at the command prompt, and when booting into Windows 95, execute the other at the command prompt.

Also, you might want to try different utilities, such as System Commander/V or whatever it's called (I haven't really used them, I've only seen them in advertisements and text references), since they might also help you with this. Of course, I don't gaurentee that they will necessarily work either, since I don't use them myself.

The feature I like in System Commander is that in it, you can boot from another primary partition on the same hard disk (you need something like Partition Magic to make that, FDisk won't allow you to make more than one primary partition), thus you can keep your Windows 95 isolated from the MS-DOS+Windows 3.11. So I'd definitely suggest you use System Commander. However, if you want less work, then even Windows 95's dual boot function will do.

You could use the feature of the config.sys SHELL command, to run autoexec.bat from a different directory. 4dos doses this quite nicely too. Works in 6 and 7.

What i found is that programs somehow expect autoexec to be in the root directory. I remember installing qemm not long after i moved autoexec off to a directory. And there it was, making edits to autoexec and config, and then rebooting. But the edit did not edit the real autoexec in a directory: it just quitely came to its usual halt, (instead of running its own proggie), and i laughed and laughed.