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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