danw95
asked on
Installation problems
Hi all,
Can anyone give me some advice about reinstalling Win 95?
Having bought my daughter a 486/66 with Win 95 Version B (OEM) installed I thought
for once everything was working OK (after we tied up the bad sector on the 2nd hand drive).
And the Win 95 ran smooth as silk then for a few days - until we needed to Drivespace her Hard Drive.
This process went fine: just Win 95 itself died. The hard drive is about twice the size
Before the Windows 95 screen a warning message comes up:
1)
ERROR, HIMEM.SYS has detected unreliable XMS memory at address 00690962, XMS driver not installed.
*****(this is an eight Mb machine). Does this mean we might have a bad RAM SIMM?
Anyway on booting up the Win 95 now we get endless error messages, mostly (after the usual Win 95 Cloudy sky screen:
2)
We get the blue screen of death with cheery message:
*****A fatal OE has occurred at 0137:BFF9A3C0. The current application will be terminated.
The current application being nothing but Windows 95, or whatever is the initial program Win 95 defaults to after startup.
Sometimes a startup gets as far as the wallpaper but crashes with the above fatal OE message.
Sometimes we get the initial Win 95 menu: but "safe boot" certainly doesn't help.
I've tried doing another Scandisk, nothing seems wrong with the drive or its drivespacing.
We can reboot through the emergency boot disk and get into the Nether world of Win 95 DOS, but that is not much use, and as an old DOS man, it is has a rather "through the Looking Glass feel", and one worries what anything one does might do to the Win 95 installation.
3)
Booting with the Emergency disk screams for "Sample.sys" that is not to be found apparently. And most importantly of all the system is now not controlling the CD drives.
Obviously a reinstallation is in order.
We have the Win 95 boot disks, however the vendor appears to have left out the DOS driver files for the CD drive, as attempting to do an install from the 3.5" floppy boot disk to the CD drive with the Win 95 renders the message:
4)
Warning: this system may not be set up to use the CD ROM. Please contact the PC manufacturer if SETUP does not proceed automatically.
Well SETUP doesn't proceed of course, and the system screams out for "OEMCD001"
Is that the plug and play CD driver?
5)
In the meantime I just realise I could most likely download the CD ROM
driver files from the Internet. Can someone assure me it is that simple, it's just a matter of getting the right files for the drive and entering them in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files?
Or is there another twist with Win 95?
6)
I don't think the sound card is set up in DOS either. Setting up DOS games (in Win 95) kept reporting that. So I'd better enter the right lines of setup in the CONFIG.SYS AND A.B as well?
If anyone can confirm this I'd very much appreciate it.
Daniel
Can anyone give me some advice about reinstalling Win 95?
Having bought my daughter a 486/66 with Win 95 Version B (OEM) installed I thought
for once everything was working OK (after we tied up the bad sector on the 2nd hand drive).
And the Win 95 ran smooth as silk then for a few days - until we needed to Drivespace her Hard Drive.
This process went fine: just Win 95 itself died. The hard drive is about twice the size
Before the Windows 95 screen a warning message comes up:
1)
ERROR, HIMEM.SYS has detected unreliable XMS memory at address 00690962, XMS driver not installed.
*****(this is an eight Mb machine). Does this mean we might have a bad RAM SIMM?
Anyway on booting up the Win 95 now we get endless error messages, mostly (after the usual Win 95 Cloudy sky screen:
2)
We get the blue screen of death with cheery message:
*****A fatal OE has occurred at 0137:BFF9A3C0. The current application will be terminated.
The current application being nothing but Windows 95, or whatever is the initial program Win 95 defaults to after startup.
Sometimes a startup gets as far as the wallpaper but crashes with the above fatal OE message.
Sometimes we get the initial Win 95 menu: but "safe boot" certainly doesn't help.
I've tried doing another Scandisk, nothing seems wrong with the drive or its drivespacing.
We can reboot through the emergency boot disk and get into the Nether world of Win 95 DOS, but that is not much use, and as an old DOS man, it is has a rather "through the Looking Glass feel", and one worries what anything one does might do to the Win 95 installation.
3)
Booting with the Emergency disk screams for "Sample.sys" that is not to be found apparently. And most importantly of all the system is now not controlling the CD drives.
Obviously a reinstallation is in order.
We have the Win 95 boot disks, however the vendor appears to have left out the DOS driver files for the CD drive, as attempting to do an install from the 3.5" floppy boot disk to the CD drive with the Win 95 renders the message:
4)
Warning: this system may not be set up to use the CD ROM. Please contact the PC manufacturer if SETUP does not proceed automatically.
Well SETUP doesn't proceed of course, and the system screams out for "OEMCD001"
Is that the plug and play CD driver?
5)
In the meantime I just realise I could most likely download the CD ROM
driver files from the Internet. Can someone assure me it is that simple, it's just a matter of getting the right files for the drive and entering them in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files?
Or is there another twist with Win 95?
6)
I don't think the sound card is set up in DOS either. Setting up DOS games (in Win 95) kept reporting that. So I'd better enter the right lines of setup in the CONFIG.SYS AND A.B as well?
If anyone can confirm this I'd very much appreciate it.
Daniel
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Sorry Daniel: I didn't realize that you couldn't get all the way into windows 95. To do so, Boot your system and as the message "Starting Windows 95" comes up, touch the F8 key and boot to safe mode. This will enable you to make your changes without windows 95 loading all of it's drivers.
Dennis
Dennis
ASKER
Hi Dennis,
Ah "safe mode"
as I mentioned in the initial question this is what happened when I tried "safe mode":
>Sometimes we get the initial Win 95 menu: but "safe boot" >certainly doesn't help.
It tried to boot but eventually screamed out for a driver (regardles of it's being in Safe mode!) and carshed to a blue screen of death with the "Fatal OE exception error message", but the exact error is just from memory. That's the one error message I didn't get down.
This really seems to cry out for what we used to call the "Vudu solution" - reinstallation of O/S from scratch.
Unfortunately, unlike DOS, and reinstalling DOS/Win3.1 "scratch" with Win95 is not very familiar territory.
I've downloaded the DOS CD drivers from the CD ROM maker's site (Wearne's Peripherals) and so now I'll try to set them up in the "DOS" that the Win95 boot disk provides (or with them on the boot disk as you suggest) and hope for a successful reinstall.
These problems began after an otherwise successful drivespacing of a 300Mb drive. I know people warn all the time against Drivespace, but we're on a budget and I ran it with Dos 6 & 6.33 /Win 3.1 fine for four years.
The defective RAM will have to be addressed next week. There is no question of that I take it with that error message: "Error: Himem.sys has detected unreliable XMS memory at address 00690962. XMS driver not installed."
Anyway thankyou for your continuing interest in this Win 95 Newbie's problems.
Ah "safe mode"
as I mentioned in the initial question this is what happened when I tried "safe mode":
>Sometimes we get the initial Win 95 menu: but "safe boot" >certainly doesn't help.
It tried to boot but eventually screamed out for a driver (regardles of it's being in Safe mode!) and carshed to a blue screen of death with the "Fatal OE exception error message", but the exact error is just from memory. That's the one error message I didn't get down.
This really seems to cry out for what we used to call the "Vudu solution" - reinstallation of O/S from scratch.
Unfortunately, unlike DOS, and reinstalling DOS/Win3.1 "scratch" with Win95 is not very familiar territory.
I've downloaded the DOS CD drivers from the CD ROM maker's site (Wearne's Peripherals) and so now I'll try to set them up in the "DOS" that the Win95 boot disk provides (or with them on the boot disk as you suggest) and hope for a successful reinstall.
These problems began after an otherwise successful drivespacing of a 300Mb drive. I know people warn all the time against Drivespace, but we're on a budget and I ran it with Dos 6 & 6.33 /Win 3.1 fine for four years.
The defective RAM will have to be addressed next week. There is no question of that I take it with that error message: "Error: Himem.sys has detected unreliable XMS memory at address 00690962. XMS driver not installed."
Anyway thankyou for your continuing interest in this Win 95 Newbie's problems.
Daniel, we were all newbies once!
Anyway, there's no way aorund that memory issue. And my reason for saying 16Mb was because even though MS says windows will work correctly with 8Mb (they fibbed), todays applications demand more upper memory area. Yopu haven't seen SLOW until you try running with 8Mb.
Anyway, if it will help, post the driver name *******.sys for your driver and I'll spell out just what you need for a procedure.
Best regards,
Dennis
Anyway, there's no way aorund that memory issue. And my reason for saying 16Mb was because even though MS says windows will work correctly with 8Mb (they fibbed), todays applications demand more upper memory area. Yopu haven't seen SLOW until you try running with 8Mb.
Anyway, if it will help, post the driver name *******.sys for your driver and I'll spell out just what you need for a procedure.
Best regards,
Dennis
ASKER
Unfortunately my daughter's computer is at another address so it will be some days before I can find out if this has the answers.
From looking at the boot files, Win95 didn't rem out the CD drive references in the boot files, but the info that it can do that is useful. It seems the vendor just didn't install them.
But regardless, this was a well thought out answer, and may have the main keys to getting the system up and running. Confirmation of the hardware memory problem was particularly helpful.