How do I fix a broken Powershell installation?

Question

on a windows server 2008 r2 sp1 machine, i used chocolatey to install the AWSTools.Powershell package. this, in turn, installed powershell 3. now, powershell is hopelessly broken and i can't figure out any way of fixing it or uninstalling and reinstalling it.

i fear my only answer is completely rebuilding the machine, but wanted to ask if there's a way to fix it.

powershell actually runs, it just seems it can't find any of the build-in cmdlets. it seems it does find aliases, but can't execute what's under them. for example, issuing an ls to look at directory contents yields:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> ls
ls : The term 'Get-ChildItem' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.
Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:1
+ ls
+ ~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (Get-ChildItem:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

it may be that there's just some execution of some script missing at the start that sets up the environment. if you know more than me and can offer some assistance and can make it so that i don't have to rebuild this machine, i would be very happy.

Answer 1

A little bit late to the game, but recently ran into this problem. I found that my PSModulePath did not include an important path. You can view your PSModulePath by running this command:

$env:PSModulePath

To add the needed path you can run this command:

$env:PSModulePath = $env:PSModulePath + ";C:\Windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\"