My sister uses w98 and her HIMEM.SYS file has been lost from the win directory.
I can see the file on a w98 start up floppy but am not sure how or where to copy it to so that windows will start.

Would it just be easier to boot to cd and re-install w98 over the top of the current install?

thanks for any help.

Boot with floppy boot disk

at command prompt type

A: (enter)

copy himem.sys c:\windows

Reboot.

Jason's got it - happened to a friends system last month and that's exactly what we did and nothing was lost and ran decent again after reboot

Copied the file OK, boot to scandisk, 85% through total lock up, reboot to safe mode, scandisk at 87%, loads of cross-linking error warnings, leave for 20 minutes,reboot to safe mode, same shit as before, final error message IO.SYS is corrupt.

I think I'm going to re-install windows when I get hold of the machine next week.

Thanks Duffman

Put 2000 on it if it cannot handle XP.

wasnt that crap to access extended memory?

rofl.... sorry mate.... rofl

reinstall and REFORMAT the drive.. or, as Jason said.. put windows 2000 on it...

So I re-insatlled w98 over existing install, got it up and running OK, my sister took the machine home and it wouldn't start......I'm very bored with w98 now so I'm going to trash the HDD and put XP home on it after all.

Thanks for the input guys....

HIMEM.SYS????????

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<Runs off into distance drooling and gabbering>

got some 9x nightmares?

i am glad you came to your senses and are putting XP Home on it... it will be TONS more reliable and faster

My sister was about to buy a retail copy of XP home, phoned me to see if I could get it cheaper. I've bought her a brand new 40Gb Maxtor AND a OEM copy of XP for £20 less than she was going to pay.

So I've just inherited her 20Gb Seagate too!!

bargain......

I just got an e-mail advertising XP Pro for $50...

$50 is abot 30 quid.

Cheapest I have found XP here for is about £60, which is over $100 USD.

Admitedly I haven't spent hours trawling the net for the very cheapest prices, but you can be sure that I won't find it in the UK for £30....

A retail (boxed) copy of XP home from the high street over here costs around £150 ($270!!!!) and the frightening thing is that people somewhere must actually be buying it!!!

I just had this problem appear on my home desktop while I was away on a business trip. Wife swears she didn't do anything. In any case, I copied HIMEM.SYS over and then SCANDISK started running. I got a weird error "Found a filename too long to read, please run SCANDISK for Windows". Also, first time it tried to run SCANDISK it took forever at 16%, so I hit "Exit" to try to bypass it. Big mistake. I got a VMM32.EXE will not run error the moment I quit SCANDISK so then I turned around and rebooted and this time let it run. It's taking a REALLY long time, so I believe I'm going to discover my Win98SE files are totally hosed. Here's my question... is there a process for putting WinXP on my computer without losing all the info on my harddrive? Can anyone point me to a "Totally Clueless Guide" on how to reinstall an operating system without losing everything on your harddrive? Thanks.

check for a virus first , and yes xp gives you the option to leave the file system intact

Thank you sir. Silly questions, they are, but two I have:

1) I have MacAfee and ZoneAlarm Pro on there. I would have thought I was okay.

2) How do I scan for viruses if I can't get the PC to run? All the virus software I have was downloaded over the internet so it's all Windows (not DOS) software.

Regards,

You cannot scan for viruses without booting the OS unless you have disk-based (DOS) virus program (bootable) If you have 98 setup as FAT32, then this will be most difficult. XP will upgrade 98 and leave the program files intact (mostly, as some will need to be upgraded). All the datafiles will be fine as long as you choose to leave the file system intact during the upgrade.

that last remark didn't make much sense to me