Peter's Blog

Gave someone a pc with a spanking new Windows 98 install on it and the first thing they did was install software on it and broke it. After a reboot Explorer gave a page fault in explorer.exe and the system was totally useless. This even happened in safe mode.

I suspected that the software installed much more recent versions of the system files and broke the otherwise 1998 vintage installation. I did a google and found q296211 which looked like a solution.

I ran through the procedure, using a dos boot disk to extract system files from CAB files until I came to comctl32.dll when the extract utility kept running out of memory. I tried installing himem.sys to no avail.

So I tried knoppix. It wouldn't boot on the pc in question so I had to whip the hard drive out and put it in another pc that I knew ran knoppix. Once in there I had to edit /etc/fstab to add rw access to the drive and then mount it. I then used the cabextract utility that comes as standard with knoppix:

cabextract base4.cab --filter comctl32.dll

I repeated for all the files mentioned in the article as I didn't want to mess about too much.

Fortunately the hard disk contained a copy of the windows 98 setup files, including all the cabs, otherwise I would have had a problem with knoppix occupying the cd drive.

Anyway I unmounted the drive, put it in it's box and problem solved. Windows 98 popped up a dialog to say someone had been tampering with comctl32.dll but when I rebooted and it didn't complain again.

Conclusion: knoppix is better than a dos prompt for fixing windows.