GRANT

Hope someone can help.
System crashed ,tryed to re-install Win98 but kept on getting warnings over Rundll and Mdm.
Eventually managed to get system up and running but with no icons and them system locks and a warning comes up,
Invalid page fault in module 0000:7f94a000:
this relates to Explorer waring and Mdm warning.

Any thoughts.

Grant

mattski

eek!

I am more of a unixy chap but here is my 2p's worth... (sounds like dodgy ram perhaps)

1. Try it in 'safe' mode, see if it works at all.

2. Try taking your ram out and cleaning it, and blow the dust out of the ram slots. Sounds a long shot but give it a go, it's worked for servers in the past.

3. Try reinstalling windoze 98... boot from the cd rom and see if it'll let you 'fix' the problem, if you install over your existing version it should just fix any bad bits. This could be risky tho... I've had installs go fine for a while, hit a problem and you're really stuck then. If you have to install it to another directory...

4. Get a linux boot disk (redhat, SuSE etc) and boot from that. Linux tends to work a lot closer to hardware and if your lucky the diagnostics upon boot will show you some problems if there is any with the hardware.

All you would need is a boot disk...

Sorry it's not of more help!

ta,
Matt.

mattski

oh...almost forgot...

the one everyone loves to hate...
try taking all of your cards out and having a bare machine to install it onto if that works.

jjones

is format/reinstall an option - you will be able to boot to DOS mode (presuming this as windows will run) allowing you to back up any files you require - either onto floppy or laplink (or similar) onto another pc. then start again.

jjones

had the system been happily running win98 in the past?

any ideas what caused the system crash?

any recent hardware/software changes?

robski

Is the machine overclocked in any way?
i.e. processor, voltage, memory bus etc etc
if it is, reverse this now

Safe mode is a good starting point.
Any new hardware or software been installed?

Any software removed? sometimes can screw stuff up

whats the machine spec? processor etc, it may be that we can tell you how to underclock it, ive found this useful for finding problems with memory etc

do you have anything like norton? often they can detect memory etc problems

do you have any important stuff on the disks? if so, what can you use to back this up to? cd writer? zip drive etc
I would be careful about trying to many "fixes" before you back up the data, ive seen cases where if the machine has a problem, the more you try to fix things, the worse the errors will get, meaning your data stands more and more chance of getting lost

what memory modules have you got? if youve got more than 1, try them 1 at a time, if the error repeats, its unlikely to be memory

actually one thats just sprung to mind is heat, is the processor fan still working?

too many ideas, where do you start!?

robski

DBDOM

ILL GO WITH THE DODGY RAM,

fast bloke

Could be a bad sector on your HDD. With a system crash that needs a re-install, you can be fairly sure that there is some corruption. Sounds like some of your system files have become corrupt/ truncated/ crosslinked. Win98, being as smart as it is, will try to replace these (unfortunately on the same sector or cluster.) When it can't find the End of File where it was expecting it, it thinks the file is locked for use, so won't replace it, but will give you a rundll error. Invalid page faults also point at either HDD or RAM, (indicating that a page loaded from your swapfile isn't what it should be,) but with the other evidence I would suspect the HDD is at fault. Simple fix is a format and re-install. If this isn't an option you could try renaming the windows system and system32 directories. You will need to do this from DOS. Then re-install. You will keep all your data, but you will probably need to re-install most if not all your applications. (If this doesn't fix it, it will kill it completely, so a format will then be necessary.) If you want to be flash about it, you could use filemon (a Microshaft utility) and a hex editor to find out exactly what is going wrong. Filemon will give you a list of all files/ dlls etc that are being requested. It will crash when the system locks up, so simply replace the last file it mentions. You will probably need the hex editor to remove the broken dll from your disk. (I am assuming you've tried scandisk or suchlike to no avail)

Hope this is of some help...

Andy Tang

iTrader: (3)

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by GRANT:
<B>Invalid page fault in module 0000:7f94a000:
this relates to Explorer waring and Mdm warning.[/quote]

Hi Grant,

Sorry to hear about that, but it's a fairly usual fault!

Normally (nearly always) a page fault is faulty memory, or it has become unseated.

Could be the hard disk... have you had problems with it, was it recently become noisy or slow???

If it's not these then the processor (but very rare!!)

Reseat all memory, processor and all the cards.

Best advice, is back up what you can, and blow the machine away and start again.

If the fault still comes up, then try some memory from another machine.

Andy

[This message has been edited by Andy Tang (edited 23 January 2001).]

GRANT

Thanks for all the response guys,system now up and running after spending 2 hrs on the phone to a nice girl Kate at Micro-rob-us.

The problem was down to a corrupted driver file for the graphics card.

In the end restored registry from the beginning of Jan and then downloaded new driver files from the Dell web site.

She had never come across the warning before, as apparently the mdm.exe file is hardly ever invoked,at even running msconfig with all starup files and the win.ini etc dissabled still invoked the same warning.

Anyway thanks again.

Grant