Win98 "A device attached to the system is not functioning"

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.

Any advice out there dopers?

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.

See A device attached to the system is not functioning

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.

An excellent tip Toddly. SFC found and replaced one dll. It didn’t help in this instance, but it is a great tip to know. Thanks.