If you are suspicious about your hard drive I suggest you use
a MSDOS boot floppy, run SCANDISK and choose the 'Thorough' option
to scan the disk surface for errors. FORMAT does not do this.
There are commercial programs which will scan even harder,
but SCANDISK does a pretty good job.

Seems odd to me you ask about your hard drive but give no details about it,
especially since you tell us about other parts of your computer.

If you made an emergency call to a veterinary but didn't disclose
what kind of pet you had would you expect good advice (or any advice :-) ?

Fdisking and Formatting the drive is rather drastic action
to take just because one file is reported missing
- it destroys ALL the data on your disk, not just Windows:
a bit like throwing all the cutlery back in the drawer
because there is a fork out of place in the table setting.

If you like to do a fresh install of Windows from time to time
(if only we always had the choice ;-), consider keeping Windows on
a separate partition or a separate disk from your applications and data.
This will allow you to Format the partition and start clean.
Fdisk is potentially destructive should not normally be used.

Consider that this kind of error could be a Registry error
or a software conflict, not a missing file at all,
and you could be creating a great deal of work for nothing.

Although you should ALWAYS have a backup of your user data
and critical Windows system files, you will save a lot of time
if you learn to do a partial installation which doesn't completely
trash your current configuration.

An answer to your problem may be on the Microsoft Knowledgebase and you
may not need a Windows installation, but if you are on your own
tricks like these will save some or all of your original configuration:

* Registry problems might be fixed by Exporting and Importing in Regedit,
  or using a repair utility
* EXTRACT can replace individual Windows files from the CAB files
* reinstalling over the old Windows will sometimes fix problems
  and doesn't remove .dlls which may have been installed by applications
* More drastic steps-
  - NB: don't save anything in the \Windows folder which will be deleted
  - Make sure there is nothing valuable on your Desktop
    (it's really \Windows\Desktop)
  - Use ERU (Emergency Recovery Utility) to save critical Windows files
    (I assume this still works for '98)
  - Regedit/Export the entire Registry to get a text file you can hack later
  - Save the \Windows files in another folder for their .dll content
  - Delete the \Windows folder and completely reinstall Windows
    then check it works and your problem has gone away
  - Save the old ERU files, run ERU again and save the new ERU files
  - Boot to DOS, restore from the _old_ ERU files and check Windows
    Stop if your problem has gone: you are close to your old configuration
    If your problem is back...
  - Boot to DOS, restore from the _new_ ERU files and
    you are back to your fresh, working installation
  - You can either accept this and reinstall old applications as necessary,
    or tinker with combinations of the old and new ERU files
    to retrieve as much of the old configuration as possible.
  - If you know your way around the Registry and there is a vital Key
    setting missing, you can edit sections from the old Registry's
    .reg text file into a new .reg file. Double-clicking this
    will install the settings into the current Registry.
    (If you edit the Registry, always "Export the current branch"
    before _and_ after.)

I'm not suggesting you would go through _all_ the above steps willingly,
they are only for retrieving something useful from the crashed
configuration, especially if restoring from backup isn't convenient ;-).

If you separate Windows from applications and data _and_ back up
Windows Registry etc. regularly (saving older versions), you should
be able to get back to a usable configuration with reasonable ease.

>On Wed, 9 Sep 1998 MISS LORI A SAPILEWSKI wrote:
>I have a Pentium 100 with 32 mg of ram running WIN 98. I tried to
>install a four year old Sound blaster 16 card.   When I booted back
>up got the message that ' file VMM32.vxd is required to run Windows.
>If not in path you may need to reinstall Windows.'  I could not get
>beyond this point.  I removed the SB card at this point.
>
>I f-disked and formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows.<(twice)snip>
>Part way through the installation I'm getting the message 'A serious disk
>error has occurred writing to drive C.  Retry ?'  I am unable to go
>any further.  I have tried this numerous times with the same result.
>
>I wonder if this could be a bad hard drive???


Len Warner <[log in to unmask]> http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/ ICQ:10120933

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