I bought a new Dell Workstation recently and the OS crashed 3 hours after turning it on trying to update Windows and was corrupted.

The OS was unable to boot the machine, so I reinstalled Windows XP SP3 per the helpdesk operator. Now the xcopy command is not recognized as an internal or external command, either through the Command Prompt or when trying to run in batch mode.

Any suggestions? The machine now has numerous programs and data loaded, so I cannot perform a reinstall of the OS.

Thanks!

Look in "C:\WINDOWS\system32"* and see if XCOPY.EXE is there. If it is there, you probably have a path problem. You can fix that by right-clicking on "My Computer" and selecting the "Advanced" tab. Near the bottom of the form is a button labeled "Environmental Variables". Click that.

The Environmental Variables Window has a section at the bottom labeled "System variables". Scroll down until you find "Path". At the right, the first thing you should see is "C:\Windows\system32". If it's different, or if you can't see it, select the Path variable and click Edit.

The first item in the string is usually "%systemroot%\system32;". It doesn't have to be the first in the string, but you should put it somewhere.

If that string is there, click "OK" or "Cancel" and scroll down to "windir". If that doesn't say "C:\Windows"*, then you should change that.

* "C:\Windows" is the most common location in Windows XP. In some older versions it was "C:\Winnt". I'm not sure what it is in Vista. If your operating system is installed in a different base directory, substitute that directory for "C:\Windows".

If it's not a path problem, then Windows probably didn't manage to be installed correctly.

Thanks!

The system variable did not have the systemroot path in the PATH variable as you described. It had paths to other programs that are loaded on the machine.

I followed your instructions, rebooted the machine and my xcopy batch copies are working fine.

Thanks again! :)