Let me describe what is happening: 1.) Two nights ago, my PC was working fine. I shut it down normally. Last night, I went to boot up my machine, and the problems began. I went into windows, and when using Disk Cleanup, I got a white screen of death (like in Windows 3.1) saying a fatal exception error with USER.exe. OK, I rebooted. I then get into windows, and EXPLORER.exe begins getting fatal executions. I reboot further, and I keep getting Blue-Screens-of-Death about problems with *.VXD files. I then reboot again, only to find that Windows won't even run. I get a "Windows Protection Error; Re-run SETUP.exe" or "Missing or Corrupt NVID.VXD (I think) file. Re-run SETUP.exe." Now, I re-formatted by hard disk and did a clean install of Windows 98 only 5 days ago. And already, I'm getting these errors. 2.) Against all hope, I re-formatted by hard drive last night, and tried to re-install Windows 98. Well, Scandisk will sometimes lock up on my second (backup) hard drive, and on the times when it does say "No errors found on C, D drives," and goes on to start "Copying files for installation," I get one of two problems: either the computer sits there (no disk activity) or the CD-ROM and hard drive lights are going, but nothing is executing. Any one out there have any clues why all this is happening? Last week, I had data get corrupted on BOTH C: and D: drives (so bad, that files were "renamed" with garbled ASCII characters). I have performed a couple of virus scans, and I don't think this is the problem. I also MAY have a short in my hard drive cable, though I'm not positive. Sometimes, I get a PRIMARY HARD DRIVE FAILURE when booting up, due to me moving the cable around. I can move it around some more, and the PC boots up. This problem, though, happens rarely. BTW, I'm running a Cyrix 6x86 PR166 (133 MHz) with 32 MB EDO memory. Thanks, and Happy Holidays folks!

I had the same problem on one of my daughters' computers; but it turned out it was one of the harddrives I was trying to put on the system. I scandisked from the start disk and checked for surface problems, found that even though a regular scandisk ( i.e. no surface scan) showed NO errors, there were several bad sectors on the drive where I had loaded Windows. (On one of my client's computers, a somewhat similar problem turned out to be a bad IDE slot on the motherboard.)

I would repartition the drive then reload everything, errors like this are often the result of currupt partition information. Have fun, Piete.

I believe the problem is related to the IDE connectors. Since it is a Cyrix 166 CPU, I'm assuming that the computer has an age of about two years. Just unplug and replug all IDE connections a few times. Also check, if you run PIO-4 or hihgher for the max lenght of 45cm per IDE cable

i would go with possibly a bad IDE controller or going bad if you experienced it on both drives

true enough you may have IDE cable, but it sounds to me you are having problems with your memory.

true enough you may have a bad IDE cable, but it sounds to me you are having problems with your memory.