WIN 95 Boot Problem

clio_16v

Hi, I'm having trouble with a friend of mines win 95 pc. When you try to boot up and error message saying that HIMEM.sys, DBLBUFF.sys and IFSHLP.sys are either corrupt or missing. I've been told that the pc was working fine until one of her kids tried to install MS Office on it.

It's a P1 75mhz with 16mb Ram. I know it's not worth spending much time or money on but its only needed for very basic use and she wants me to try to sort it.

Any help will be appreciated, Cheers!

Ruu_Old

re-install windowz id say

Capt'n Midnight

sounds like they deleted stuff so reinstall

do you get to a c: prompt ?
type in set to see the path
dir c:\windows
dir c:\windows\command

clio_16v

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

sounds like they deleted stuff so reinstall

do you get to a c: prompt ?
type in set to see the path
dir c:\windows
dir c:\windows\command

Cheers for the responses!

dir c:\windows\command ? will this just show whats in the command directory? will that help me? I've put in the Win 95 cd but it won't let me restore, probably something i'm doing wrong. I tried to change the boot sequence to make sure it'd load from the cd drive but couldn't find it! I'll have another go in a sec...

Capt'n Midnight

The windows 95 CD is NOT bootable - a nice gotcha.

Can you boot to windows or dos and see the CD drive ?

Plan B is to borrow a windows 98 cd/ setup floppy to boot from and then copy the WIn95 folder to the hard drive and then run setup from there.

16MB ram - better off with Win95 less pain and it would be illegal to upgrade to 98 even though it's really Windows 95 Version 3 (cf. OSR2)

Ruu_Old

Do you have the windows 95 setup floppy disks? think theres 13 of them

clio_16v

Ruu wrote:

Do you have the windows 95 setup floppy disks? think theres 13 of them

No! where wud i get them? or will i just tell this woman to throw the pc out? i could do with the money being a student bum and all! I have a copy of win95( with Usb support!!) on cd but thats all....

Ferror

Backup any important files, boot the computer using a bootdisk, floppy or otherwise, format c:\

Use fdisk to make a shiny new partition.

Restart the computer, use the bootdisk again, change dir to cdrom drive, something like 'cd d:\'

Type dir, you should see setup

Running that should get you back on track, presuming the hard drive is still ok.

Failing that you could put always out a request for a free machine in fs wanted, i'm sure there's a few pII/ pIII's gathering dust somewhere..

Cheaper than pulling the drive or popping the case even :P

Have fun

pickarooney

Whatever she's paying you could surely be better used on a newer computer (a PII or something).

[edit]that may have come out wrong, I meant it purely from her point of view[/edit]

Capt'n Midnight

Ferror wrote:

Backup any important files, boot the computer using a bootdisk, floppy or otherwise, format c:\

Use fdisk to make a shiny new partition.

Restart the computer, use the bootdisk again, change dir to cdrom drive, something like 'cd d:\'

Type dir, you should see setup

:rolleyes: - format/fdisk only as a last option and only if you have all the media for all the programs AND a complete backup - eg dial up passwords , bookmarks etc.

another option is to RENAME the windows folder if you have enough free space.

BTW: some versions of 95 used to disable the dos CD drivers during install - result you could not see the CD drive so install would not finish, also unless you have a driver in Config.sys you may have the same problem with a clean install - moral - ALWAYS copy the win95 folder to the HDD and run setup from there if you have the space. Also rename c:\windows\win.com win.moc to prevent OEM setup bombing out on a message that there is already a version of windows on the machine.

Another alternative would be to get a PC with 95 on it already and put the old drive in as a second drive so all the files would be there.