I gave my old computer to my folks. It is a Compac running Win98. My sister thought that she would “clean up” the disk and deleted many things. One of them was the old CardFile program. I tried to re-install it, but I get the message “A device attached to the system is not functioning.”
Today I tried to upgrade Mom’s AOL. I get the same message. The CD rom drive runs fine and I can copy files from it. In fact, I copied the entire CD to the hard drive - and I still get the message when I try to run setup. I also tried to run Win98 setup to see if there was a repair option.
I did a google for it and got a lot of hits, but none of them seemed to be the problem. One of the things I was adviced to do was to rename MFC42.DLL and reboot. This did not work.
Something else I tried was to run in MS DOS mode and do a SCANDISK. SCANDISK did not run.
I assume that there is a missing DLL, but cannot figure out which one.
P.S. I ran the control panel, looked at the system properties and the device manager and it does not show any devices having a conflict or running poorly.
If your sister nuked a lot of binaries that the system is still looking for in some form or fashion, you really need to save critcial data, format the disk and re-install the OS. The message you cite often occurs with scenarios involving missing or damaged binaries. It could be any number of missing files causing the error message.
I will take a different approach and suggest that you give System File Checker a try. Win 98 came with this nice little utility and I used a couple of times to repair some corrupted system files when I used 98.Check this page about the renamed dll file and SFC and how to use it. Read it carefully before running. Good Luck and post back on how it goes.