Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

I’ve got a rather interesting case today, a private customer brought in an old machine running Windows 98, which his son still used.

The customer told me that he tried to install a driver for accessing USB sticks, and after that, the machine didn’t boot anymore.

The error message displayed was:

Configuration Manager cannot load because one of the following files is either not present or has an invalid version number:
VMM.VXD, SHELL.VXD, VTD.VXD, VXDLDR.VXD, VPICD.VXD.

Try Running SETUP again.
Press Any Key to Continue.

The machine wasn’t able to boot in safe mode either.

At first, i looked for the named files using a old boot floppy. I was able to find vmm.vxd, located in C:\windows\system\vmm32. I wasn’t able to find the other files.

That seemed strange to me, installing a driver wouldn’t delete these files. I looked around on the Web, and found
KB186771, but this one was talking about Windows 95.

I then setup a clean install of Windows 98 in a VM (using the free Microsoft Virtual PC), to have a clean reference machine. I found out that vmm.vxd is not there in a default Windows 98 install.

The next step was obvious - rename vmm.vxd to something else, and try booting. The effect of this was rather interesting, as the machine now just hung during boot, not displaying any error message. While this wasn’t what i hoped for, it was better than nothing.

I tried booting the machine in safe mode, and this worked fine. I tried uninstalling the USB driver installed by the customer using the Software Panel in the Control Panel, but that didn’t help.

As a next step, i looked for files that looked like USB drivers - i’ve found a file called uhci*. Next step was to look for files with a similar timestamp as the one i’ve found. There were about 7 of them. I moved them to another directory, and the machine finally booted.

As a final step, i’ve found Windows 98 USB Mass Storage drivers, installed them, and tested them.

Everything was working fine again. The whole procedure took me about 1.5 hours, a lot of that was attributed to the fact that i no longer have a Windows 98 VM lying around, this was one of the first Windows 98 systems i’ve seen in ages.

A lot of customers seem to not really care about the fact that Windows 98 is End of Support. Using supported operating systems is usually a guarantee for a faster and more cost efficient solution to any problem you might have with your hardware.