Windows 98 Won't Boot

[Rewired]

Howdy folks. This is my first thread in the emergency help forum. I really hope you can help me get through this. Thanks in advance. Here's the issue:

This box has been running Windows 98 and we tried installing Windows XP over it; meaning not a clean install. Anyway somewhere along the lines we got a fatal error forcing us to exit the Windows XP setup. It went through some exit setup procedure and then booted to the following error:

The following file is missing or corrupted: C:WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
The following file is missing or corrupted: C:WINDOWS\DBLBUFF.SYS
The following file is missing or corrupted: C:WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS
The following file is missing or corrupted: COMMAND.COM

Type the name of the command interpreter (e.g., C:WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM)
C>

This error occurs each time I reboot the machine and when I use F8 to boot in Safe Mode. I'm out of my shell here and I would really appreciate any help on this one. If I can provide any information that would help further diagnose my problem please ask. Thank you so much.

-Mike

[Gobbles]

sounds like the boot sector of your hdd is corrupted or damaged. Get a diagnostic disk from the maker of your hard drive and run a diagnostic test on it.

after that, you pretty much will have to do a reinstall as 98 has no repair install feature.

[Rewired]

Hey Gobbles. Thanks for your post. I used Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) (Linux Live CD) to recover some of my data before I performed a clean install. Then I boot off my Window XP CD and created a new partition for the install. The new NTFS partition was created ok but when I got to the point where it started copying setup files to the hard drive it kept saying Windows can't copy so and so file to your hard drive, would you like to continue? And then it crashed and I got the blue screen of death. I don't have any diagnostic tools that came with the hard drive. Do you know any good disk sweeping / error fixing software? What else can I do to get this computer to install Windows properly?

[Rewired]

The file Setup placed on your hard drive is not a valid Windows XP system image. If you are installing from a CD, there may he a problem witht the Windows XP CD

I followed the procedure described in this post (http://short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32854). I don't think the problem is the CD though as I've used it successfully before on other machines. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Flintstone]

Whenever I have had that problem it's turned out to be a bad CD drive, or at least uncooperative. I'd suggest switching to a different drive and trying again. Barring that, the disk may be dirty or scratched or somehow buggered up to the point that it can't be read properly.

[Rewired]

Thanks for the post. I actually did try two separate CD drive as I has similar concerns. Neither CD drive worked. I mean it's not conclusive evidence but I don't have the means to try a third drive. I tried reseeding the IDE cables to make sure they're properly plugged in, etc. This machine just won't behave. :shakehead

Continued help, ideas, brain storming would be greatly appreciated. Write now I’m looking for a scan disk type utility that would theoretically find bad sectors in the disk :scratch:

[Rewired]

I ran Memtest86+ on a hunch and it's reporting over 500,000 errors in the first pass. I'm reluctant to buy new memory because I have a feeling that's no the only thing wrong with this machine. Thanks for everyone’s help.

Oh yeah. How can Identify what type of memory is needed? There is no manufacture.

[Donut]

Can you identify the mobo? Or a model no. if it's an OEM machine?

The mobo makers website "should" tell you what kind of ram it takes. (or a manual)