Windows98 hanging at boot while loading IFSHLP.SYS

[jkersenbr]

OK, i'm working on an old Win98 system and it has me completely befuddled.

It had been hanging at boot when the owner brought it to me. It would boot into safe mode and I found it had viruses and spyware out the wazoo, so I decided to reformat/reinstall.

Well, even after reinstalling, while attempting to boot the first time it hangs. Looking at BOOTLOG.TXT it shows the last entry to be IFSHLP.SYS.

Then I remove everything (litterally) except the video card and keyboard and one stick of RAM...same problem.

So, I thought the hard drive might be bad. Ran Maxtor PowerDiag on it (since it's a 10GB Maxtor) and it passed the "recertification test".

Just for giggles, I popped in another known-OK 30GB drive with the same result.

Any ideas what is going on and how to get this POS to boot in normal mode?

 

[Fardringle]

It's not the exact error message you are getting, but I would recommend trying Microsoft's instructions to repair a corrupt or missing IFSHLP.SYS file:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q258471

 

[DaiShan]

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean when you say you put in a known ok 30gb drive with the same result? Did you do a fresh install of win98 on that 30gb and set it to primary master and had the same problem, or did you pull a boot drive from another win98 machine in the hopes that it would boot? Windows in general, but specifically the 9x line does NOT like for you to swap motherboards and then trying to boot into an existing Windows install.

I'd recommend that you

1) Back up the clients data
2) Try a "dirty" install of win98 first (boot from the win98 disk and install on top of your current partition, this generally preserves data and program integrity, but writes new OS files to the drive)
3) Failing that, clean install and restore the data. I use Drive Image by PowerQuest, the image is actually browseable as if it were its own separate hard drive, that way you can put the clients files back where they were before. (Just put the image on a secondary hard drive and drag and drop the files back onto the clean install. Most of the time they wouldn't even know that you did a clean install if you didn't tell them (their files and icons are right where they left them)

 

[jkersenbr]

Just for an update: I found the problem and nobody was even close. It's a motherboard problem...specifically in how it handles memory. It is extrememly memory picky. I tried about 30 different known-working DIMM's in it and found 1 that works. And it would only work in one of the slots.

So, I scrapped the mobo.

BTW, the 30GB I tried was reformatted with a fresh install...