Oh great hive-mind you're my only hope. A drone-node in our collective
will not comply. What's wrong with my Gateway 2000 486sx-33, 8MB RAM,
ISA 2x-CD ROM?
Over two years ago I'd installed Win95b from CD and it worked fine with
MS-Office on a Win NT/Novell LAN -- never one problem. Then it sat
unused for about a year. I'd pulled it out of the closet sat it on its
side on the floor awaiting space on my kitchen table workbench. Trying
to manuever through the obstacle course of survivor PCs, I accidentally
knocked it over -- the crashing sound made me cringe.
When I finally got around to it I wanted to install one of the free
dial-up web access services. I chose Alta-Vista because the entire
installer fit onto one floppy. As part of the requirements I had to
upgrade Internet Explorer (IE) from 3.01 to 4.x. During the install I
kept getting blue screen crashes, IFSMGR and VxD. I also got Windows
registery error pop up crashes.
I tried re-installing IE 4.1 and continued to get crashes but after
several attempts I finally made it through the install of IE 4.1.
I then installed Alta-Vista, connected and it was really s---l---o---w,
so I shut down and upgraded the RAM to 16MB. Afterwards I didn't notice
much speed difference in Alta-Vista compared to the browsing when
connecting to my for-pay ISP. During this time I continued to get the
same blue screen and Windows registery error crashes.
On the final crash I couldn't restart at all with blue screen of death
on startup. I reformatted the HD, as well as FDISK, reinstalled Win95b
and IE4 and continued to get the same blue screen and Windows registery
error crashes. I thought perhaps the RAM SIMMS may be defective so I
switched to a different 16MB SIMM, reformatted the HD, as well as FDISK,
reinstalled Win95b and IE4 and continued to get the same blue screen and
Windows registery error crashes.
Then I thought that perhaps because this Win95b CD was labeled as
"support for USB" that there was an incompatability with my 486sx-33 ISA
bus, so I reformatted the HD, as well as FDISK, then tried Win95a and
IE4 and continued to get the same blue screen and Windows registery
error crashes.
This time I bailed on Alta-Vista and wanted to try Juno's free web
access. After making it through numerous crashes during the installs I
again switched the RAM SIMMS to a different 8MB SIMM and continued to
get the same blue screen and Windows registery error crashes.
Again I reformatted the HD, as well as FDISK, reinstalled Win95a, IE4
and Juno 4.0 and continued to get the same blue screen and Windows
registery error crashes. I removed the modem, soundcard, reset the BIOS
to factory defaults, changed the keyboard, serial mouse to PS/2, changed
various combinations of the modem and soundcard or none at all and
continued to get the same blue screen and Windows registery error
crashes.
By this time I was suspecting the hard drive may have sustained damage
when I knocked it over. I downloaded Western Digital's Data Lifeguard
Tools v2.2, ran it as a boot floppy, 4-times and it reported NO problems
with my Caviar 2340 HD.
I looked up IFSMGR.SYS and VxD in Peter Norton's "Inside the PC, 8th
edition" and although it didn't specifically say what was wrong with my
PC, it gave information that IFSMGR.HLP is loaded directly after the
hardware layer, in the real mode layer (BIOS and DOS), and the VxDs are
loaded in the next layer, 386-protected mode. Oh yeah, now what?
In weeks past there was discussion on SURVPC about 2X CD-ROM
incompatabilities with Win 95, but it worked fine for over a year when
it was used with Win95 on this same PC. When I knocked it over did I
damage the motherboard? If I did then why doesn't Data Lifeguard Tools
have the same problem accessing the hard drive as Win 95?
Is this a hardware problem or software problem or both? Is the fate of
this non-compliant drone-node to be salvaged for it's floppy, CD and HD
and the motherboard/case carcas thrown into the trash among the other
non-SURVPCs? Oh great hive-mind, what's wrong with my PC?
*** |===| PACKARD BELL * Pack-Mate Legend 386x ***
* __|___|__ 386sx-16Mhz, 4MB, VGA-256K, DOS 6.22/WFW 3.11 *
* |_____==_=|~~ MY OTHER COUNTING BOARD IS AN ABACUS! *
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