DOS stuck at startup

theotherosproject

I had a fresh installation of MS-DOS 6.22 on my ThinkPad X23, here are the specs:
- Pentium III-m processor @ 866 MHz
- 256 MB installed RAM
- 30 GB hard disk, of which ~44 MB is used for the primary DOS partition.

Shortly after installing Microsoft C-C++ 7.0 (3.5), MS-DOS stopped working; after rebooting, all I had was this:


I believe this is a problem with extended memory since I had problems with it previously (while running a benchmark utility, it froze while testing extended memory).

Anyone can suggest how to avoid, if not fix this? Thanks.

SomeGuy

It looks like MS C++ installed older versions of himem.sys and emm386. The ones shown are not the DOS 6.22 versions.

No real way to prevent that sort of thing with DOS programs. Just keep backups of your config.sys and autoexec.bat handy before installing stuff, and note what versions of drivers work or do not work for you.

In this case it probably installed copies in to a different location, so you just need to edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys to point back to the ones in your DOS directory.

TCPMeta

Just hit F8 when DOS loads and it will ask if you want to load HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE and select NO. Then once you're loaded into DOS just toss in the DOS install Disk 1 and run EXPAND for EMM386.EXE

C:\DOS\EXPAND A:\EMM386.EX_ C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE

Then toss in install Disk 2 and run EXPAND for HIMEM.SYS

C:\DOS\EXPAND A:\HIMEM.SY_ C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS

After that you should be back to normal.