Win98 won't boot after installing XP's SP2

[Siljer]

I know the title sounds a bit odd, but I assure you I installed XP's SP2 in Windows XP on my C: partition only a few days ago. Since then when I try to boot up on the Win98 D: partition I get some errors right before any icons start showing up on the desktop. After that everything freezes, except I can still access the task manager and reboot.

The first error is a white message box saying explorer.exe caused an error and I must reinstall Win98. The second error is a normal gray box saying uxtheme.dll is linked to a missing export in ntdll.dll RtlInitializeCriticalSection. That’s when it freezes.

Restoring the registry to an earlier date in the command prompt doesn’t seem to fix it, and it appears nothing in D:\Windows has been changed or affected since the date of installing SP2. My only guess is that Win98 has a few files on C: that might have been affected.

I thought maybe Win98 was missing uxtheme.dll since there is none in the D:\Windows\System folder. I can’t find this file in any of the cab files on the Win98 cd either so I’m guessing Win98 isn’t even supposed to be using this file.

So I tried opening Win98’s ntdll.dll in notepad to see if I could find this missing Initialize "export". It’s not even in there, though it’s definitely in WinXP’s ntdll.dll.

This is pretty confusing. Is there any way to fix it without formatting, because that would mean I would have to format everything including WinXP?

[mattofak]

well, if your c: and d: drives are on different physical drives, remove c: and see what happens... also is your d: where the MBR is stored, if it is, its possible winxp altered your boot.ini, autorun.bat, winboot files, so you could look around in sysedit and see whats up... else, dont know, dont run win98 anymore

[Siljer]

The C: isn't removable, but if I did remove it I have a feeling Win98 wouldn't load because it might depend on a few things in the root C:\ directory. For one, it prints the bootlog.txt there. The autoexec.bat and other startup files (also in C:\) don't seem to contain anything (0kb).

If this doesn't seem fixable, is there any way to reinstall Win98 without having to reinstall WinXP overtop?

[Siljer]

An update:

I replaced the System.dat file with the System.1st file, which for some reason worked better than any of the backups I had, and after spending some time reinstalling drivers, it seems to work fine now.

There are still some minor problems, however:

Before windows loads, it says the system.ini refers to some missing vxd files:

vnetsup.vxd

uredir.vxd

dfs.vxd

vnetbios.vxd

I don't know where they could have gone (if they were there to begin with). I checked the system.ini and it doesn't refer to them. I'm refraining from extracting them off the Win98 cd until I figure out what's going on.

[mattofak]

there is of course ways to reinstall win98 without having to reinstall winxp... simply install over your existing 98 install, and then on boot, open up your boot.ini, and readd the entry for XP... the bootloaders havent really changed since nt so it should work...

[Eck]

Yes, but make sure to uninstall Internet Explorer first if you've updated it (which I assume you have) from what came on your 98 cd. Otherwise you'll need to format, as things will be even more messed up. (Like, totally.)

After you've reinstalled you can then reinstall Internet Explorer 6 SP1.