{"id":97155,"date":"2017-10-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=97155"},"modified":"2019-03-13T01:32:32","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T08:32:32","slug":"20171009-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20171009-00\/?p=97155","title":{"rendered":"Why does NTVDM create empty IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100720-01\/?p=13383#comment-848533\">A:-)Brunu&#347;<\/a> asks why NTVDM creates empty <code>IO.SYS<\/code> and <code>MSDOS.SYS<\/code> every time it starts up. <\/p>\n<p>For compatibility, of course. <\/p>\n<p>Specifically, it was added for one particular program that searched for the MS-DOS system files, and if they are missing, it got confused and corrupted your <code>CONFIG.SYS<\/code> file. <\/p>\n<p>This reminds me of another program we discovered in Windows 95 that parsed your <code>SYSTEM.INI<\/code> file, and if any line in that file was longer than 80 characters, it deleted your <code>SYSTEM.INI<\/code> file outright. That&#8217;ll teach ya. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Compatibility, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-97155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Compatibility, of course.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}