When your cluster suddenly needs more power, you don't want to wait 10 minutes for POST, kernel booting, and copying quite a few GBytes from disk into RAM, when you can instead get up and running in a few seconds.
You may know ahead of time when your systems are most at work, say 0800-1800, so WOL at 0730, for exmple.
c:\attrib +r +a +s +h *.*
Enabling "rash mode" makes dos 3.3 much faster. (I hope you keep a boot disk.)
I think what you meant was
C:\>attrib +r +a +s +h *.*
Running c:\attrib would look for attrib in the root. Where it won't be. You should try c:\dos\attrib which is down the stairs, second door on the right.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.