Drive Letter Changes During Windows 98 Upgrade

• Microsoft Windows 98

SYMPTOMS

When you upgrade your Microsoft Windows 95-based computer to Windows 98, the drive letter for the partition on which you are installing Windows 98 may change during Setup, and you may receive the following error message when Setup restarts your computer:

The following file is missing or corrupted:

D:\windows\himem.sys
D:\windows\dblbuff.sys
D:\windows\ifshlp.sys

Cannot find Win.com, unable to continue loading windows

CAUSE

This behavior can occur if Windows 95 is installed on a logical drive on an extended partition and you have a second physical hard disk installed in your computer that contains a partition formatted with the File Allocation Table 32 (FAT32) file system. Some versions of Windows 95 do not recognize FAT32 partitions. When you install Windows 98, Windows 98 is able to recognize the FAT32 partition on the second physical hard disk and then assigns it a drive letter. This may change the drive letter assigned to the partition on which you are installing Windows 98, causing Setup to generate the error message listed earlier in this article.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this behavior, uninstall Windows 98, and then temporarily disconnect your second hard disk until after you reinstall Windows 98:

1. Uninstall Windows 98. For information about how to uninstall Windows 98, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   Q186102 How to Uninstall Windows 98




2. Disconnect your second hard disk, reinstall Windows 98, and then reconnect your second hard disk.

MORE INFORMATION

Changing the references in the Msdos.sys file to reflect the drive letter change does not correct this behavior because the previous drive letter is also referenced numerous times in the registry.

For additional information about drive letter assignment and the FAT32 file system, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q51978 Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows Assign Drive Letters

Q154997 Description of FAT32 File System

Additional query words:

Keywords : kberrmsg kbsetup kbui win98
Version : WINDOWS:
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbprb