here's a conundrum

Acrylic-bob

Acrylic-bob

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A couple of weeks ago my Desktop PC got worms and crashed. It is a Hewlet Packard machine running Windows 98 and is so far out of warranty that it does not bear thinking about.

It is an old machine but I love it and would like to get it back up and running again, not least because there is tons of stuff -several gigabytes- on the hard drive that it would be really useful to get hold of again.

The problem is this, when it starts up it gets to the point where it installs the desktop, it puts the background image up and a little message which reads "explorer caused an invalid page fault in module explorer.exe at 017f:00401f31" and then goes on to list a bunch of registers.

Even though it is ten years since I last played with DOS, I have tried successfully renaming the file in DOS thinking that if it couldn't find the damaged file it couldn't load it, with the result that the machine told me to reinstall windows.


I have tried copying explorer.exe from another Win 98 machine and copied it into C:\Windows only to get the same page fault warning as before.

Clicking on the OK button in the message makes it go away but the machine just stops right there.

I have a recovery CD but DOS does not recognise drive D: and there is no other way that I can think of to get the cd reader to work.

Is there anyone out there who has any ideas??
 
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A-B, I have a solution for you. It will either let you burn it off or if there is a network card in there allow you to squirt teh data over the network to another machine.

On your good machine go to www.knoppix.org. Select the UK/USA flag to switch to english. Down the bottom select Downloads. Select the Mirror.ac.uk http link(or ftp if you know how to use ftp). Accept the license agreement. You will then get a page with a directory listing.
 
Then look for a file Down the bottom called KNOPPIX_V3.7-2004-12-08-EN.iso It is 700Meg. Click this to download.

When its downloaded use Nero or whatever you have to burn the disc image(iso) to CD. This will create a bootable disk with a full OS on it. It is Linux, something you probably know I use as an alternative to Windows. This is a special version because you do not install it to hard disk. It runs purely from CD. Stick teh disc in the old HP machine and boot teh machine. If it doesn't boot from teh CD you need to change it in teh BIOS. Let me know if you don't know how to do this

(Step three coming next)
 
When it first boots it stops at a boot: prompt. type knoppix26 and press return. It will now boot the machine into a fully working system. If you watch the screen you will see it scan your machine to see what hardware is installed etc. You get a nice GUI with LOTS of programs to use. It will run a bit slow as CD is a lot slower than HD and it has to decompress the programs first as there are over 2 gig worth of programs squeezed into 700M.

Let me know if you want to go down the squirting over network or burning to CD and I'll talki you through the next stage.

PS If you want walking through it add my MSN user [email protected] and I'll chat you through via MSN in realtime

Ian
 
Thanks Entwisi, Ive got to the download bit, but at at download rate of 56KBps it is going to take the next three hours.
 
Aye, I know, even BB seems slow sometimes :)

Its a very useful disc to have around. You can rescue knackered systems with it.

Speak soon

Ian
 
There are times you really want to throw the Bl**dy thing through the window. With 25 minutes to run on the download the bl**dy modem decided to drop the line! So much for a service that is supposed to be "Always on". Not for the first time I wonder what I am paying £27 a month for.

Is there anywhere that I can find this on a CD, or a faster download site?
 
A-B If you use an ftp site and a decent FTP client(WS-FTP or CuteFTP or AceFTP) then you can restart the download where it dropped out. I have a copy of teh iso on my PC. Where do you live I'll burna copy and drop it off.

Ian
 
This isn't a solution, more of a thought - if you are paying £27 per month for dial-up, it sounds like someone is ripping you off.

I pay less than that for broadband
 
It's Ok chaps, and thanks for the offer Entwisi, I have managed to get it downloaded at the second attempt.

Now I have to go out, so it will be tomorrow before I can use it. Should be fun!
 
As long as you're not in a contract, there are plenty of companies out there who would be happy to take less of your hard-earned cash and deliver a faster, more reliable service!
 
I don't think its dial up Vorlon, 3 hours for 700Meg is 512K BB.

I think its just that A-B uses a BB modem rather than a modem router that the more technical users know is the right way forward.

Ian
 
Mornin Chaps,

Yes i have a Thompson Speedtouch BB modem and to be honest I have had nothing but problems with it since I got it. I have been considering moving to Pipex, but since I am going to be moving house at sometime in the next few month I thought that I might as well keep BT until then and make a clean break when I actually move.

Coming back to the problem of the old PC, I can access the CMOS but not the BIOS.

In CMOS I can disable "boot up" from the Hard Drive, will this do it?
 
Well, that was fun - while it lasted. I went into CMOS disabled boot up from the C: drive, put the CD in the tray and off we went....or rather we didn't. The blessed thing booted from the C: drive regardless! Stumped!
 
There is normally a first boot device, second boot device third boot device. Make sure that the first one is set to CDROM. Disable the others. Also when it starts up on teh POST screen(The first one where it tells you how much memory etc) look for something that says F12 Boot Menu or the like.

When you rebooted, did it try teh CD first and then drop back to the HD or did it not even attempt the CD?

Ian
 
I have two options on the start up screen - ESC (Post) and F2 (CMOS) Pressing ESC merely pauses boot up.

I tried disabling all boot devices and reasigning the first one to CD-ROM. It had a quick look at the CD, a couple of flickers on the indicator light, and then loaded win98, presumably from the c:drive. ?
 
One other thing which, thinking about it, might have some bearing on the problem. When the worm struck I tried starting up my virus program AVG. But this made the problem worse and seemed to cause everything to crash.

Now, when everything is booting, AVG scans, possibly the satrt menu, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it doing this. If avg is the infected program could it be this that is causing explorer to report a page fault. And if, through DOS, I deleted avg*.* would that perhaps make a difference?
 
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