Fix Windows9x .VXD BSOD, inside...

[Halz]

All installations of Win9x bypass the inclusion of several fairly important .VXD files related to the major devices in your system. In the place of these missing files, Win9x commissions vmm32.vxd, a .vxd we are all familiar with in the 'blue screen of death' situations. When installed, these files will provide a stability unknown to Win9x. To find which files are missing, from the "Device Manager", view the "Properties" of a device and click the "Driver" tab. From the "Driver" tab, click on the "Driver File Details...". Any files with parentheses around them are the missing files which need to be retrieved from the .cab files WIN98_47.cab and WIN98_48.cab for the standard Windows 98 CD and .cab files WIN98_53.cab and WIN98_54.cab for Windows 98SE. Once the files have been located on the CD, the files need to be copied to the c:\windows\system\ directory and c:\windows\system\vmm32\ directory. Once the files have been copied properly, you will notice that the parentheses will be removed.

Not only will this make your Win9x system more stable, but it might even boost your system performance..

 

[AndyHui]

Hmm....this has been debated before with regard to Win98 mainly, and people coming up with entire zip files full of vxds....

These vxds are not actually missing...vmm.vxd is simply a compressed library of all those required vxds....so rather than a whole series of various vxd files all over the place, they are all conveniently kept in one place, the vmm.vxd file.

While it was seen that in certain situations it may provide only a very slight increase in gaming performance, this was not seen in other applications.

I personally have seen no difference whether using the complete vmm.vxd or using separate vxd files. I think a lot of the time when you do get vmm.vxd errors, it's best to just find it on the CDROM and replace the entire library, as likely as not one of the virtual device drivers has been corrupted.

 

[Eug]

Heavily overclocked system, including CPU, memory, drives, and video.

Cracking OGR full time.

Gaming online in UT and benching offline in Q3 intermittently. Hadn't required a boot in several days, much less even a BSOD. (Of the BSODs in the last year and most were due to overclocking waaaayy too much or trying to run two high-speed devices via USB simultaneously.) I've only had maybe 1 unexplained BSOD in the last year.)

P.S. This is Windows 98 first edition, with updates.

 

[medic]

Andy is right, vmm32.vxd is what's called a monolithic driver made up of many individual vxd files and compressed with drivespace.

An excellent read on this is here:

http://www.infinisource.com/techfiles/vmm32.html

Intro:

Rumors:

Before I go into the details of telling you how to rebuild a corrupt vmm32.vxd file, let me first say with very strong emphasis that there is no truth to the reports that Win9X does not install all required *.vxd files during installation. While it's possible that such a bug may have existed in a very early Win98 beta release (going back to when it was called Memphis and not Win98), there is no such bug, nor has there ever been such a bug in any released version of Win95 thru Win98 Second Edition.

 

[Halz]

Well, all I can say is that it has improved performance and stability on all of the Windows9x systems I have used..

 

[Burn]

Hmmm, I have never heard about this before, shows how little I know. Sounds interesting, but why would it increase stability?