Jimmy,
        Two things here make me think that you are looking at hard drive
failure. First, the sequence of events is typical of events that
I have seen when a hard drive is starting to die.
        Secondly, you said you have a Western Digital hard drive. Last
fall, Western Digital had a recall on hard drives that would fail
shortly after being used. They have a place on their web site
where you can go and see if yours is one of the recalled drives.
http://www.westerndigital.com

        I just did a quick search, and it says the recalled drives are
all 6Gig drives... but you can download their diagnostic software
and run it to make sure your drive is OK.

Elizabeth Boston
[log in to unmask]

> -----Original Message-----
>
> I have a newly built system that crashed today.  I had
> just closed one program and was trying to open a new
> one when the system froze.  I powered off to reboot.
> I was taken to the same screen that comes up and lets
> you go to Safe Mode.  At that screen I was given a
> message that said "Windows had detected a
> registry/configuration error."  The next message said
> that the C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS file was missing or
> corrupted.  I was told to run SCANREG from the command
> line.  It would not work. Everything I tried said that
> I could not read from that disk.  I booted to my Win98
> boot disk.  I could get to the C: drive and see the
> files.  I had trouble running the dir command.  I
> could not run any .exe files on the C:\ drive.  I
> tried to run SETUP from the Win98 CD (to reinstall
> Windows).  I got the same error message.  I built this
> system about a month ago.  Everything has been working
> perfectly until now.
>
> Is there a way to recover from this without
> reformatting and reinstalling everything?
>
> My system:
> AOpen AX6BCPro motherboard
> PII 400
> PC100 128MB
> WD 4.1 HDD
> Windows 98 SE
> FDD, Zip, CDROM
>
>
> Jimmy Fikes

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