Win98 PCI Bus Drivers went bye-bye?

Factual Questions
1

Hello all,

Something rather odd happened last night / this morning. I am running Win98 on an Asus P3B-F mobo, PIII 550. I have, among other things, Asus probe, Mcaffee Vshield and Blackice Defender in my system tray. I downloaded the Half-Life update and a couple of mods (Goldeneye and Uplink) from download.com, installed them (could not get Goldeneye to work, but Uplink worked fine) and had a rousing good time.

Then I restarted my system. When it came back up, a couple things were out of whack. For one, it said that my PCI Bus was not properly configured, and that I’d have to reinstall drivers. Yikes, said I. In addition, it said that my display drivers were not configured properly, and it could only run in 256 colors. Sure thing. Lastly, it seemed that mousetrails were on. Ugh. I don’ t think (and I have subsequently verified) that the Accessibility options were installed. Lastly, when I opened up MyComputer>Properties>DeviceManager there were yellow exclamation points everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but under disk drives, display and system.

When I went to reinstall drivers (using the Wizard) it asked for pci.vxd located on my Win98 CD. However, because the PCI bus wasn’t working, it could not read my CDROM (nor could it get to my USB modem). I was able to find it under c:\windows\system, pointed the wiz to there, and used that to reinstall the drivers. After a restart, all seems well. I ran Mcaffee just to be sure, and it found nothing. Nada.

So why am I writing? Because I am a quivering mass of fear at the moment. I believe that a stray particle from space can knock an electron here or there loose, but how do I know that this is the case? That is, what else can I check to make sure that there is not some evil lurking within my system. Had I not found the right files, would I have been forced to reinstall winders? If so, what happens to all of the software on the disk, embedded in the current registry. Does all that need to be reinstalled as well? Yikes. Lastly, when the problem first arose, it seemed that there were more problems than just the PCI Bus – display drivers, modem, drives, etc… Were these problems a result of the screwed up PCI Bus? How do I test my system to make sure that there isn’t a hardware fault awaiting to happen at the worst moment? How do I sleep now? Egads!

Paranoiadly yours,

Rhythmdvl

2

My systems seem to become more and more unstable with time and get to a point where it is better to start from scratch. I have read that you should reinstall everything about once a year but i have never been able to go one year between reinstallations. If I were where you are I would think this is a good moment to reinstall windows and then all the software. Still, before you do that, you might want to see if you can determine what happened. I had a situation where I would spend a whole day reinstalling everything and the system would corrupt it the next day. I did that a number of times until I found out I had a hardware problem.

So, i would try to correct the problem if you can do it easily by reinstalling whatever files were corrupted but, if it turns out to get difficult, youare better off reinstalling.

Good luck.

3

No biggie, you could have run the new hardware wizard, it would have found the stuff. Then SFC, the system file checker would have settled the rest.

4

What happened is that your registry file got damaged
(for whatever reason) which tells Windows where and how your hardware is plugged into the system. Realistically there is nothing you can do short of changing your operating system to absolutely prevent this sort of random zap from happening.

This happens more often than you may think and I have had to deal with this same problem several times on various systems over the years. You did all the right things to recover. It’s scary, but trust me, there are lots of other worse things that could have happened. It it continues to happen you likely have a drive media damage or memory corruption issue going on.

Some things you can do to make recovery smoother.

1: Make a directory on your hard drive called c:\win98 and copy all the Win98 CD *.CAB files into there.

If your system has restarted in safe mode without CD access this will give you access to the necessary Win 98 re-initialization setup files.

2: Make a DOS boot floppy with the CD access drivers initialized so you can get boot strapped back if there is a peripherial CD based driver you need and safemode is locking you out of CD access.

3: Hard drives are super cheap now. Spend 100 - 200 and get a nice 15-30 gig unit and back up your entire system once every 2 weeks or so. Cheap insurance.

4: Make back up copies of your registry files at least once a week. Go to the system information section under system tools and this very nice, little known (but very useful) applet will walk you through the process (and lots of other stuff too).

5

astro, W98 makes at least 6 backups of the registry & you can reload them.

6

Sorry should have been more specific. If you are concerned about registry corruption (ie you think machine may be unstable) you should make a registry backup and store them in a specific directory, preferably even off the machine if you have a storage media option bigger than a floppy.

The automatic reg backups you refer to that windows makes are subject to serial corruption in the case of memory corruption or media damage situations in that, in many cases if the reg file is goofed up windows will still (even though it shouldn’t) overwrite recent good copies of the reg file with the bad one on bootup as part of the automatic reg backup process. In those cases you wind up chasing your tail looking for a good reg file and at that point saving what data files you can and blowing out and re-installing windows is the only real option.

Older reg copies (even if you can find a non-corrupted one) often lack pointers to latest installed programs, drivers and hardware and the tossup between having to re-install and re-initialize the newer programs, drivers and hardware (often not a trivial process) to get the system up vs simply cleaning out Windows and re-installing generally falls into the “clean out and re-install option” side of the decision tree.

Trying to overwrite a bad Win95/98 setup by re-installing windows (vs removing and re-installing fresh) is generally (not always) a recipe for wasted time and frustration.

Off site reg files (if saved recently) have saved my bacon more than once. You may not need them often but when you do.

Thanks for the clairification though.