Setup May Damage FAT on Primary 1 GB Internal SCSI Drive

• Microsoft Windows 95

SYMPTOMS

When you start your computer from a network boot disk with no special settings for Emm386.exe and then run Windows 95 Setup from a network drive, Setup may not finish correctly. When this occurs, you may find that the file allocation table (FAT) on drive C is damaged when you restart your computer with a startup floppy disk.

CAUSE

The damage occurs because the network boot disk loads Emm386.exe without any exclude ranges for the network card and Windows 95 Setup starts Smartdrv.exe. When SmartDrive puts its buffer into the high memory area (HMA), it overlaps the memory area the network card is using. During the file copy process, this data is damaged and gets written to the hard disk.

RESOLUTION

To avoid this problem, use one of the following methods:

• Use the correct exclude range for the installed network card.
• Start Setup with the following command to avoid starting SmartDrive:

        setup /c
  

• Do not use Emm386.exe or any other memory manager.