Hi,

I hope someone has seen this before. A friend of mine has a packard bell PC approx. 2 years old. It has 64Mb of RAM 10Gig HDD and was running Win 98 without problems. He was running word and the whole system hung and was unrecoverable without rebooting. After this he was unable to load Windows. A colleague of his talked him through formatting his harddrive and running FDISK!.

Now when booting the PC from a boot disk it hangs when loading himem.sys. If I skip this part the PC will load into DOS but obviously cannot run windows setup or scandisk because himem.sys is not loaded. Himem.sys is on the boot disk but just won't load. The same happens from a Win98 CD so it's not a corrupt himem.sys.

I've swapped the memory and the same happens as I thought that himem.sys checked the memory sticks.

Occassionally the PC will display random ASCII characters when trying to complete a task and then hang. I've managed to copy the Win98 CD onto the HDD so I don't think it's the hard drive either.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Try another boot disk.
If that does not work, and the replacement memory is known to work, then it's possible that the motherboard is bad.