I am lost...

00rm250 · #1 (**permalink**) 03-01-2005, 08:35 AM

Yesterday I went to power up my pc and it keeps shutting itself off during boot right at the windows splash screen. I am able boot into dos but that's it. I have installed no new hardware/software.
I am thinking this may be related to another problem I had a while back. Then it would stall during boot with an error message to the affect of missing or corrupter himem.sys. I fixed that based on the procedure in MS knowledge base.

Well, this time I tried to run scandisk from dos and got a similar message regarding himem.sys missing and to make sure a particular line appears in config.sys.
went into edit config.sys to view himem.sys. It shows a couple hundred lines of some suspect strange looking characters. Being a rooking I dont know what this could mean, is it a virus...

Anyway, at this point my thought is a clean re-install of windows, but before I go through this headache of a process I thought I would ask for suggestions first.

Win 98se
Celleron 1000
Tyan Trinity 400
640 mb ram

discgolfer · #2 (**permalink**) 03-01-2005, 10:11 PM

Config.sys is a text file, and if you are seeing garbled characters then that may be your problem. Try this:

Boot to DOS prompt.
Rename your config.sys file to config.old (or something similar).
EDIT a new config.sys and put the following line in:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
Save the file.
Make sure the himem.sys file exists in your c:\windows directory.
Reboot and see if that helps.

00rm250 · #3 (**permalink**) 04-01-2005, 05:13 AM

OK. Attempted ren config.sys config.old
result= file not found???

00rm250 · #4 (**permalink**) 04-01-2005, 07:52 AM

OK, a few more details.
I tried to boot with step by step confirmation.
I get the following errors:

The following file is missing or corrupted: C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
There is an error in your config.sys file on line 2
BUFFERSHIGH=20,0

The following file is missing or corrupted: C:\WINDOWS\CWDINIT.EXE
There is an error in your config.sys file on line 8
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\DBLBUFF.SYS

Then a couple lines down it gets to
c:\windows\wininit.exe

c:\
A line of random characters

And this is the point at which the pc shuts down.

I believe wininit.exe is associated with a virus, I'll have to do some more research.

In the meantime, any more suggestions would be great.

00rm250 · #5 (**permalink**) 04-01-2005, 08:16 AM

OK. Not sure of the how or why, but after some reading in the good old MS knowledge base I extracted wininit.exe from my win98 cd since wininit.exe was missing from my windows directory for some reason.
So it boots into windows now which is great, but I am still very bothered because I don't know why this happened...and because it took me about 8 hours (on and off) to get the dumb thing going again.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this stuff happened?
By stuff I mean the missing emm386.exe, missing himem.sys, missing wininit.exe.

For now

discgolfer · #6 (**permalink**) 04-01-2005, 02:36 PM

Glad it's working now. Missing/corrupted files could be from various reasons - virus is one. I did a Google on wininit.exe and found links that describe it as the Bymer Trojan. Here is a link on Symantec's site:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ven...llw.bymer.html

owen · #7 (**permalink**) 04-01-2005, 02:41 PM

Think you might have hit the nail on the head there discgolfer, this could have been caused by a virus and it obviously looks like it has.