Dave-H

Well, finally my problem is cured!! :thumbup The answer has finally come from Rudolph Loew, the creator of the Windows 98/SE/ME RAM Limitation Patch. I had been using version 5.1 of his patch for some time, to allow my system to function with 4GB of RAM installed. With it Windows 98 sees 3327MB, pretty near the same as Windows 2000, and the limit for a 32 bit OS. Rudolph has just released the next version, 6.0, which includes some interesting options for optimising the use of low physical memory. I quote from his manual - "Some Devices, especially many Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, require space in Low Physical RAM. Low Physical RAM is also used by Windows 98 or 98SE for Memory Tables. If there is not enough Free Low Physical Memory, Windows will crash during Bootup. Reboot, a Blank Screen, or a VFAT Error are the most common symptoms." Well, that describes my problem completely! It even explains why disabling my network card allowed the system to boot, something I never understood. Why it's taken so long to discover this is a mystery to me, as I did an enormous amount of research on possible causes of the problem. Anyway, using Rudolph's new patch, with the necessary switch which moves the VXD data above 16MB, and adding his additional low memory splitter program to autoexec.bat, the problem has completely gone away! I restored all the data to my registry which I had stripped out and backed up as being superfluous to get the size of the system.dat file down, and the system still booted, with a file of over 14MB! That would have been impossible before. So thanks indeed Rudolph! I hope you are subscribed to this thread and read this. Anyone else suffering similar problems, you now know where to find a fix - http://rloew1.no-ip.com It's not free, but IMO it's worth $20 of anybody's money, as it does exactly what it says on the tin, and more! After all this time I am well pleased.

Thanks again Ascii2. I think I'm at the point of giving up now. I managed to get rid of one of my ControlSets, one that was marked as "failed". It took me a while to work out how to change the permissions so the system would allow me to delete it. but eventually I did. This made very little difference to the SYSTEM file size. I then ran a registry compacter for NT registries which I found called NTREGOPT, which reduced it from 9MB to 6.2MB! At last I thought, but still no go, the system still wouldn't start with any of the newer start-up files. It looks as if three ControlSets is the minimum you can have, the Current, Default, and Last Good. Delete any of those and either the system won't start, or if it does it puts the deleted one straight back again. If even 6.2MB is too big for the system to start, I think I'm defeated. It started with the 2MB SYSTEM file in my Repair folder, but the system wouldn't complete loading, so that's no good. I can't imagine that I would ever get my working SYSTEM file down to anywhere near that size without removing so much that the system would be crippled. I'm now very worried for those earlier in the thread who said that their systems worked fine with the loader files from XP or 2003. I suspect that this only worked because they had very small SYSTEM registry hives. There is of course a high probability that this will not remain the case, and they will suddenly fail to boot without any warning. "Last Good Configuration" should work in that scenario, and I hope it does! I hope that if this happens to people that they read to the end of this thread and discover what the problem is, and that they've kept backups of their original 2000 loader files (or have a 2000 disk to restore them from!) So, I'm resigned to keeping the loaders as they are on my system. I have at least pruned the registry size considerably, which can't be a bad thing! My next line of attack (and I haven't ruled out trying jaclaz's proposed solution as well) is to try and just get my present boot a bit quicker. I've done all the obvious things like disabling all unnecessary services and startup programs, but the main problem is very early on in the process. I've done some research into the 2000 boot process, but haven't been able to find a definitive account of what order things happen in, and what's on the screen at that time. The "Starting Windows" bar goes across pretty quickly, so that's not a worry. The big pause comes at the next stage, the splash screen. The progress bar at the bottom moves across in jerks, but pretty quickly, until it gets about three quarters of the way across. It then pauses, for about 20-25 seconds, before moving on. That is what I really want to get rid of, as I'm absolutely sure that it hasn't always done that. I don't know what's happening at that point, but there's no disk activity during the pause. It's like it's waiting for something, or looking for or scanning for something. I suspect it's hardware device related. When it reaches the pause point, the keyboard lights flash momentarily, and then go out. They come back on when the bar moves on after the pause. Also at that moment there is sometimes a flash on the screen, and occasionally the display blacks out and then comes on again. This all sounds like hardware driver loading, but why the long pause? If I could get rid of that, and as I said I'm sure it hasn't always done it, I would be satisfied! Any ideas? I have no "problem" hardware on the system as far as I know. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks guys. Sorry jaclaz, I think I understand now! I obviously had completely the wrong end of the stick there. It would of course be very silly indeed to have to have a floppy in the floppy drive to boot up! I will follow up your suggestion if I don't get anywhere with my registry investigations. Ascii2, thanks so much for researching those KB articles for me! The one I was most interested in was 269075, which contains a section on reducing the size of the SYSTEM hive, which is exactly what I want to do. I went through it, but was puzzled to find that one of the registry keys that it refers to doesn't seem to exist on my system. It's "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Share". All I have under \CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer is a subkey called "Shares", not "Share". That is empty apart from a "Security" subkey, which is also empty. There is no "Share" key in any of the ControlSets under that path, so I couldn't proceed with that procedure to reduce the SYSTEM hive size. I did get hold of copies of the Windows 2003 NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and OSLOADER.NTD files and gave them a try. Really bad move! It didn't boot, with the same error message, and when I went into Windows 98 to put the original files back, I got a frightening message that the MBR was corrupted! When I went into the Windows 98 Recycle Bin it warned me that was corrupted. Most worrying of all, when I went into "My Computer" on Windows 98 I found to my horror that all the drive letters (except C: of course fortunately) had been rearranged! I was really worried that I'd hosed the system completely, but fortunately once I'd restored the original 2000 startup files and deleted osloader.ntd, everything returned to normal after a reboot. So, where do I go from here..........

Well, I now have an important update! I've made something of a breakthrough since my last post earlier to-day, which deserves a new post I think. Not an actual fix I'm afraid, but I'm a lot nearer to understanding (I think) what's happening here. I was wondering, if you remember, whether the size of my registry files was an issue. My SYSTEM file, which is the file mentioned in the error message, is 9.26MB. Having had similar issues with registry size in Windows 98 (here if anyone's interested) I wondered if this could be a similar issue. I also read on the MS Knowledge Base that Windows 2000 only has 16MB of memory available while it's booting up. So, I did an experiment. I backed up my registry, and then substituted the SYSTEM file in D:\WIN-NT\System32\Config with the much smaller SYSTEM file in D:\WIN-NT\Repair. That file is only 2.77MB instead of 9.26MB. I then installed the XP NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files which Ascii2 kindly provided. The system booted without the error message! The "Starting Windows" bar didn't appear at all, and the progress bar on the splash screen was much faster in completing. Then it went wrong. It got as far as displaying the GUI background, but before the "Preparing Network Connections" message came up, the system just rebooted. I tried again with the same result. I then put the original SYSTEM file back, and tried again. Same result! I then put all the registry files back from their backups. Same result! Strangely, the system file was always reverting to the smaller version. There is a SYSTEM.ALT file in the folder, and it's possible it was reverting to that. I got the system up and running again by replacing the registry backups again, and the original startup files. Then everything returned to normal. So, I'm pretty convinced that the problem is being caused by the SYSTEM file being too large. That almost certainly explains why simple later version startup file substitution works on some systems and not on others. It only works if the registry, or probably more specifically the SYSTEM file, is below a certain size. I assume that the loader is trying to fit the registry into memory on boot, and basically it's too big to fit into the limited memory then available. The 2000 loader possibly doesn't do this, which may be one of the reasons that it's slower. There must be more to it than that of course, or Windows XP installations would fail to boot if the registry got too big, but I'm sure that's the gist of the problem. The smaller SYSTEM file I have in the Repair folder is I believe the one that was backed up when Windows 2000 was last installed. It is from October 2007, which would make sense as I did have to do a repair install not very long ago, and that was probably it. Unfortunately it looks as if that file is not up to date enough now to start the system. So, what I need to do is get the size of my existing registry down! I've tried a compacter program on it, but that said that there was only 4% fragmentation, and made little difference. The SOFTWARE file is huge, 36.3MB, but I'm hoping that it's only the SYSTEM file that I have to worry about. So, what's stored in that file, and how can I go about reducing it? I assume that it contains the stuff in the "System" hive. I have three "ControlSets" as well as the "Current" one. Is that really necessary as they seem to be rather a lot of data. Can I somehow lose one or two of them without disaster? Any more help greatly appreciated. I feel I'm on the verge of finally cracking this now!

Thanks again Ascii2. Disc/disk, I've never been sure of the correct way to spell it depending on context. I always use "disc" to refer to round flat things generally, especially old things like vinyl record discs, but "disks" (US spelling?) when referring to computer disks/discs! A bit like "programme", the usual UK spelling, and "program", the US spelling, but always used when referring to computer programs. In fact my spellcheck (supposedly UK English) says that it's always "disk", and "disc" doesn't exist! Anyway, we digress............ Thanks for the files. I tried them, but the same result of course. I don't have access to a Windows 2000 SP4 CD, all I have is an update installation file for SP4, and while that contains later versions of NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM (which still don't work) it has no Recovery Console files included in it. I will do a search and see if I can download them from somewhere. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks guys, jaclaz your possible suggestion sounds interesting, but are you saying that I would have to have a floppy image on a floppy disk in the floppy drive when I boot to implement it? Ascii2 thanks for your input as always too. I will wait until I can lay my hands on a Windows XP disk again to try it out. There seems to be no uninstall routine for the Recovery Console. Do I take it that all I need to do is delete the C:\CmdCons folder and remove the CMLDR file? Is there anything else I need to remove before I try installing the XP version? Cheers, Dave.

Fixed! Thank you so much MDGx. I tried installing the HTML Help update and Scripting update that you pointed me to, and that made no difference. In fact I already had later versions installed, HTML Help 5.2.3790.309 Unofficial and Scripting 5.7.0.20550 Unofficial respectively. I then decided that rather than reinstall IE6 SP1, I would try just running the IE repair option from the tools under MS System Information. That fixed it. I then went back to my later versions of Scripting and HTML Help, and all still good. I guess I'll never know what the problem actually was. I had no reason to think that it was an Internet Explorer issue, as IE seems to work fine in all other respects. Very strange. Anyway, thanks again, and I hope the attachments issue is resolved soon. I will delete the spurious dummy post that I had to put up, and edit the post pointing to it to remove the reference. Cheers, Dave.

OK, I've done that, and here it is! [Link now deleted - problem has been solved] I hope the attachments issue is fixed soon. Please let me know when it is fixed and I can re-do things normally. Thanks very much for your help MDGx. Anyway, back on topic! This is what I'm getting whenever I open a chm help file on Windows 98. I cannot find why. Can anyone suggest any possible causes? Thanks, Dave.

Post deleted.

Thanks so much! I've now realised that although I've used attachments before, I've never in fact used them in the Windows 98 forum, but mainly in the Windows 2000 forum. I've just gone back there and tried, and lo and behold, there are the attachment upload options! The attachment upload facility does not appear to be there in the whole Windows 98 forum, although it is there in the "Windows 9x Member Projects" sub-forum! The uploading of attachments facility is obviously disabled in the Windows 98 forum. I have no idea why this should be, and can only assume that it is an error. Perhaps the mods could look into this, as there is no indication of it anywhere and it had me tearing my hair out trying to work out what was wrong! I can upload my attachment to one of my existing posts or a new post on a different forum, but not on this one! I've tried modifying another post in a different forum as you suggested and then transferring the code for the image to this post, but it doesn't work! The image only seems to work on the post that it was originally attached to. I've even tried putting in a URL link to the image as it appears in my attachments control panel list, but that doesn't work either. I get a message saying "Sorry, dynamic pages in the tags are not allowed". So, what do I do now?!

Well I've tried rolling back to the original Windows 98 version of HTML Help, which made no difference, and I've now gone back to the unofficial version 5.2.3790.309 which is in the latest AutoPatcher. Still no joy. I really would like to post a screen grab of this problem, but I still can't find the option to upload attachments to this board! I have uploaded attachments before, in fact I have nine listed if I go to "manage attachments" in my control panel, but that only gives me the option to delete them, not add more! I only have a very small amount of my allocation used, so it's not that. I'm sure that there was an option on the "add reply" screen of the board to upload attachments, but it just isn't there anymore, no matter what browser I try. Any help appreciated from a moderator or anyone else. Thanks, Dave.

No worries. I assumed the OP was talking about Windows 2000 as that's what is in his signature. It wouldn't be Windows XP unless he posted in the wrong forum, but it could indeed be 2003 as you say.

The OP is on Windows 2000 not XP. His default Windows folder will be C:\WINNT not C:\Windows. I'm not sure if the "noexecute=optin" switch is relevant on Windows 2000 either.

Thanks for that, I will check it out, but at the moment I'm more interested in getting the normal Windows HTML Help system to work than just finding another way to read .chm files. I'm worried that the fact that it's not working may be a symptom of a more fundamental problem somewhere!

Thanks. I have never had ntbootdd.sys, arcldr.exe or arcsetup.exe on my system. It has always seemed to work fine without them. The latter two are in the %systemroot%\ServicePackFiles\i386 folder. Ntbootdd.sys doesn't exist at all. My "SYSTEM" registry file is 9.25MB in size. Is that excessive? I do have the Recovery Console installed.

Thanks for that. I had a look at the utility you mention, and ran it, but it didn't seem to find anything wrong that's relevant to the problem. I was a bit apprehensive about a program whose documentation seems to be mainly only in Chinese, but it did seem to work OK, apart from the plugins bit, which I couldn't get to work at all. Any other ideas? Everything I've checked out relating to the HTML Help system files and registry entries seems to be perfectly OK, so I am really stumped. I also tried re-registering the dll and ocx files, but no joy.

Yes thanks, that what I eventually did. Thanks for that Ascii2, I will check it out. I'm interested what you say adout "registry hive fragmentation" as my registry is quite large and has never been optimised, so is probably very fragmented. I optimise my Windows 98 registry all the time as I have startup problems if it gets too large, but I have never bothered on Windows 2000. I'm wondering if this may be an issue here.

I have a problem with .chm help files being displayed in my Windows 98 installation. All the files display as HTML code instead of displaying properly. I've been trying to post a screen shot to illustrate the problem, but although I've done it many times before, I can't now find how to upload attachments to the board! If someone could remind me I'd be very grateful! Anyway, the basic problem is that the left hand pane displays correctly, with all the tabs present and correct, and it all works, but in the right hand pane all I'm seeing is HTML code, with no formatting or images. I have tried reinstalling the HTML help files, which all seem to be present and correct, but this makes no difference. Internet Explorer (IE6 SP1) appears to work fine, but if I try to open a .chm file in IE as a test, it just opens in HTML Help instead, with the same fault. I assume that is normal behaviour, but why won't the HTML Help browser display files properly? Anyone any idea what I should be looking for to fix this? Thanks.

I think you can use recovery console and do this: EDIT: Or another OS. That works too. Rename the \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file to SYSTEM.BAD Copy the \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM.ALT file to SYSTEM This restores an older copy of the System hive and might fix it. That error occurs occasionally to my Windows 2000 and I would just have to change it to the ALT version and everything would be fine. Thanks for that, I could actually do that in Windows 98 as I am dual boot. Unfortunately the problem isn't that the registry is corrupted in any way (or any files missing!) What's happening (I think) is that on my machine for some reason if I have the NTLDR file from any other NT OS version except the original 2000 one in my C:\ folder, the system will not start because it's doing something that it shouldn't with the registry files. There isn't actually anything wrong with them, in fact if I put the original NTLDR file back without doing anything else everything comes good again. It is a mystery, because as I've discovered through this thread, it works on some machines and not others.

I know exactly what it will do, as I tried it so see if it would get Windows 2000 working again. It puts the Windows 2000 startup files back again! This fixed the problem, but of course Windows 2000 was back exactly as it was before, with a slow startup. What it would have done to Windows XP I don't know, as I didn't let the XP install complete. Quite possibly it would have made Windows XP start up just as slowly! So it looks horribly as if Windows XP will boot with the Windows 2000 files, but Windows 2000 won't boot with the XP files, at least not on my system. Of course if you trawl back in this thread, you'll see that using the XP files HAS worked for quite a few people. I just wish that I could figure out why it works on some machines but not others. I'm not 100% sure that anyone else with a dual boot machine has got it to work. I would be very interested to know if that was the case.

Ah, thanks for the warning! Well, it might be a bit of a "frankenbuild" but multibooting Windows XP with other MS OSs should certainly be supported, so I'm not asking for anything particularly non-standard!

Just a heads up about a possible problem with the version of the Adobe Shockwave player in the latest Auto-Patcher. I had been using version 10.2.xxx for some time, which certainly works fine with Windows 98 and I think is the last version to be officially 98 compatible. AP contains a version of 10.3.xxx which is supposed to work with Windows 98 OK. In my experience, although it installs OK and appears to work, it still has some issues. What was happening on my system was that it would run OK in Internet Explorer and would display the content OK, but on navigating away from the page, or shutting IE, the browser would immediately crash badly, usually resulting in me having to reboot. Try as I might I couldn't resolve this, so I've gone back to version 10.2. and all is fine again. This may not happen on every system of course, but I thought it worth mentioning just in case it happens to anyone else. If you have an installer file for shockwave 10.2 don't trash it just yet!

Another update. Tried out Ascii2's suggestion of going through the first stage of a Windows XP install. Unfortunately, no go. Everything went as it should, and I aborted the install at the first reboot stage. I now had Windows XP in the OS startup list from boot.ini, and XP setup was ready to do the GUI stages. Unfortunately, when I tried to run Windows 2000, immediately back came the "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM" message. So, no difference I'm afraid. This is now even more puzzling, as it seems from this that if I really wanted to install Windows XP and have a triple boot system, I would no longer be able to run Windows 2000, which surely I should be able to do. Does this mean that in this scenario I would have to put the Windows 2000 startup files back and boot XP with them?! Surely not! I'm now thinking of asking MS about this, as although they don't give any free support for Windows 2000 now, they should still support XP, and I can submit the question as a Windows XP support query, because dual booting 2000 and XP should surely be possible. If installing XP makes 2000 inacessible that needs to be sorted out. So, back where I started I'm afraid...............

The quickest fix I can think of would be to just put the drive in another machine and reformat it, asssuming you have another machine to do it in of course!

Wow, I didn't think this thread would come back to life! Thanks for the additional information Ascii2. I tried downloading that MS patch, but the NTLDR file in it produced exactly the same result on my system, it wouldn't boot, with an error message about the registry "SYSTEM" file being missing or corrupted. Reading the KB article, it does sound like exactly the same symptoms though. I will try to borrow a Windows XP disk and try your suggested method of doing just the first part of the setup. BTW when you were describing that, were you were talking about running setup from within Windows 2000, or booting from the Windows XP CD? It won't run from a command prompt. I also assume that you would select to do a separate install, not an upgrade, or it will overwrite the Windows 2000 files! I'm not quite ready to give up on this yet..........