First, apologies for the multiple post, there doesn’t seem to be a
group for Win98.
A few weeks ago, while downloading a song from audio galaxy, my dell
optiplex gs+, only 97K RAM, froze up; the media player was running, in
addition to WinAmp, so I’m assuming I ran out of memory. On trying to
reboot though, I got this message:
Error Message: VMM32.VXD is required to run Windows.
If this file is not in your PATH, you may need to reinstall Windows.
Very annoying. I could not get into windows at all, even through safe
mode, I just would get the same error message after the windows 98
splash. (I was able to get to the command prompt though.) First
thing I tried to do was read about this mysterious file that seems to
be created during a Windows session (virtual memory file) that acts as
a single driver for all the drivers combined. Couldn’t get the
computer to recognize the CD-ROM drive so I downloaded a Win98 boot
diskette off the web which had a driver for the CD-ROM and then tried
to reinstall windows by going through the setup procedure, etc., from
a CD.
However, the message I got back was that Windows was _not_ an updated
version (this was the same CD used the first time around) and so it
exited, not letting me reinstall it over itself. (I’d like to keep my
previous settings for the look of the browser, colors, etc., the
favorites menu, and so figured Windows would allow me to do this.)
So, in my old windows directory, I just changed the win.com file to
win.123 and similarly changed win.ini and a couple other files. I
didn’t read this anywhere, I was simple frustrated and was trying to
improvise. Windows then _did_ allow me to reinstall from the CD, but
a new directory was created, c:\windows.000> and none of the old
settings were used! (I should note that before I tried to reinstall,
I did try to ‘scanreg /restore’ to see if I could restore the
registers, but it failed. Also, I tried a couple other suggestions I
read off the microsoft website, all failed, hence the resinstall.)
Futhermore, when I did a scandisk first as recommended, there were
scores and scores of problems with many of the files in my old
c:\window> directory. I finally decided to do a ‘scandisk /autofix
/nosave /nosummary’ to get it the hell over with.
Also, there seem to be a number of files missing, for example
executable files for winamp, yahoo and msn messangers and a number of
others (the hard disk is only half full). The ‘shortcuts’ still seem
to be there, but on doing a recursive ‘dir winamp* /s’ search on the
hard disk, the winamp directory reads zero! (Note: all these apps
were running at the time of the crash.)
Finally, as a separate problem, even with the reinstall, I cannot get
the dialer to get a dial tone with my modem, which previously had
worked just fine: I get Error 630. (All wires are connected
correctly, and in fact, haven’t even moved since everything worked
perfectly just a short time ago.)
My questions:
1. Know how to reinstall Windows 98 over itself and use the same
c:\>windows> directory and settings, etc., just as if you were doing
an upgrade? (I did look to see if there were any switches on ‘setup’
to allow you to do this but could find none.)
2. Know why so many, perhaps, hundreds of ‘fix-it’ or ‘skip-it’
errors came up on scandisk? And could this have premanently corrupted
my previous hard disk copy of windows 98 (in the c:windows> directory)
when I did a ‘scandisk /autofix’?
3. Know why there would be executable files missing or erased
(winamp, etc.)? Does ‘scandisk’ erase files when repairing?
4. Know what may be causing my modem problems? I’m assuming that if
I can reinstall to make it like it was before, perhaps it will work.
5. Finally, anyone else had the VMM32.VXD problems? What did you
learn about it and what did you do to avoid the problem from
recurring?
Many thanks for any help, I’m at the end of my wits! Very frustrated
and am considering just buying a Mac, my friends who have them never
seem to have any such problems.