Windows start-up

I picked up a yard sale computer, mainly for the kid to get on the web with, about a week later he comes to me with the news that 'something's wrong with the computer'.

OK... it's a Packard Bell Legend 1824CDT running Windows 95+ with 32M of memory a 133MHz Pentium, 1G Host Harddrive and a 1.5G main Harddrive (compressed with Drivespace 3).

The first thing I noticed was that the CMOS battery was dead (I THINK I've managed to trial and error the settings back to where they should be,) the second was that on startup it boots up fine, goes to Windows, displays the wallpaper and norton, then the fun starts. Namely 'invalid page faults'.

The first one is msgsrv32 in module Kernal32.dll at 014f:hff9a08c.
Registers:
EAX=8025b57c CS=014f EIP=bff9a08c EFLGS=00000246
EBX=815672cc SS=0157 ESP=8025b578 EBP=8025b5cc
ECX=00000156 DS=0157 ESI=00000000 FS=1f5f
EDX=8025b788 ES=0157 EDI=00000157 GS=0c86

After this there's a bluescreen 'A fatal exception OE has occured at 0028:C02679e8 in VXD VWIN32(04) +00001088.

Go on past that and the taskbar and icons come up. Then Systray proforms an invalid page fault, and the beat goes on.

Before you ask, it does the same thing trying to start in Safe Mode.

A friend told me that the only thing that he knew of that would fix it was to reinstall Windows. I checked with the folks that sold it to me and they didn't have the system disks, so I picked up a new set (Probably the last copy of Windows95 for sale in the area...wound up paying more for it than I did for the computer). Went to run the setup and was told 'Windows setup requires 'largest executable program size' to be at least 429056 bytes to run.

Any advise that can help me either stop the IPFs or reset the 'largest executable program size' will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Traveler

BTW:
The kid says that some of his friends 'tried to fix it' so who knows what all that poor thing's been put through. Make no 'nobody's dumb enough to' assumptions in this case.
Thanks again.

 

Thanks! I tried this and format won't touch it because it's compressed while drivespace says it can only run from windows, which at the moment won't even start in safe mode.

Know any good DOS based format utilities that can take out a drivespace disk?

 

Use fdisk to delete, then re-create the partition, set it as active, then you can format it.

You will lose everything on the drive doing this, so back up whatever you want to keep.

 

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!


It worked like a charm!


(Singing) "I'm back in the saddle again"...

:>

Traveler