himem.sys?!?!

[Pollux]

alright... my friends computer won't load windows anymore... he gets to the loading screen and it says can't find himem.sys ... he can go to dos though.... any suggestions?

[bdog]

Is it a Digital computer? I administer about 20 computers and three of them are Digitals. For some strange and unknown reason two of the Digitals give this error message ocassionaly. I have never seen it on a different brand of computer. It seems to usually occur after reseting the computer with the reset button, or reseting from within windows while installing software. 90% of the time when this occurs, I power off the computer, let it sit a few seconds, and turn it on again, and it works. I have checked and the himem.sys file is in the windows folder, I have also ran scandisk and there are no errors. The other 10% of the time when the above doesn't work, I change to the directory where the himem.sys file is, and type himem.sys, (I think it gives some kind of error message) and then type win, and it boots up. I don't know why this works, but it does. If anyone has a better solution to this problem, I would greatly appreciate it. I hope this helps Pollux.

[Mbarb]

We had the same trouble with a few PC's that were running Norton AV. They would only report this if they were reset, never at power on.


Is Himem on his system where it should be??

[RobRich]

In the config.sys make sure you have the lines:

DOS= HIGH,UMB
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device-c:\windows\emm386.exe noems

Also make sure himem.sys actually is in the Windows directory. If you don't have a config.sys file (some don't), create it in your root directory (c:\). I usually use the noems switch since I don't need expanded memory support in most situations, just extended.

[CMonster]

Use a startup disk to boot the computer, and change to drive C, at the DOS prompt type as follows:

C:\more config.sys and press enter (or you can use the "edit" command if you need to make changes in config.sys).

it should display the contents of config.sys on the screen

look for a line like this "DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS"

copy the HIMEM.SYS file from the boot disk A: to the location on C: drive specified in the config.sys file and this should fix the problem

(there can be several other variables that cause this error, including error in config.sys line or an error in the PATH statement)

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 09-22-99).]

[ocynic]

Ahhh! Himem.sys. I once rehabbed an old 486 that gave me a real thorn in my ***. A20 gates, himemory mansger, himemsys, 386emm and so on. That device=himemsys etc. line can take many shapes. what I did learn was that at times anew driver such as an atapi CD driver will place itself above himem on line 1 of your config.sys. himem.sys MUST be first. Depending on your BIOS there are other descrptions added to this line, such as machine number and so on. I did alot of research on this and found out that it alot of trial and error. But be sure that himem.sys is first in config.sys