China DOS Union

An old 486 in my office with window3.x installed, after someone messed with it once, on startup it shows “bad or missing command interpreter,Enter named command interpreter", then it gives the command prompt “c>"
instead of the normal “c:>". From the English, I guess it means the command interpreter is wrong or missing, and I should enter the correct command interpreter. Maybe someone deleted the commad file. I'm installing DOS right now. But what I don't understand is, no matter what command I type, it doesn't work. Does anyone know what causes this? Is there any simple solution? I really don't want to format the drive and reinstall. Because I don't have the Windows 3.x disks

Do you have a DOS boot disk? If you do, you can just sys c:. No need to format.

thank you, I'll go try it, but I don't know what version that DOS is, hehe. What DOS version does WIN3.X use? Someone above, please explain it to me, thanks

You can try entering:
c:\dos\command.com or
c:\command.com or
c:\msdos\command.com or
c:\pcdos\command.com
If none of those work, then you'll have to first boot the machine with a DOS disk, then judge the DOS version on the machine from things like the dates and times of the files in the DOS directory, help files, and so on. Then use the corresponding DOS version and the SYS A： C： command to transfer the system files to drive C.

WIN31 only requires DOS 3 or above, so you don't need to care what version the original DOS was using, just do a SYS directly. ROMDOS or PCDOS will both work. Or find DOSTOOL in NU6/7; it can replace the DOS version arbitrarily.