What kind of system specs do you have?

boot with a dos floppy drive
then type in

c:\
type config.sys

and post the contents here

I think it means himem.sys isn't loaded.
make sure you do have a device=c:\dos\himem.sys in your config.sys
You might want to have EMM386 loaded too

It sounds to me like the windows installer has screwed with your PATH settings.
When you start the PC and you see the mesage 'Starting MS-DOS' start hitting the F5 key and that should bypass your autoexec.bat/config.sys and get you to a basic command prompt. From there you can edit the config files.
Paste the contents of your autoexec.bat and config.sys here.

At a guess I'd say that these files don't have the full path to HIMEM.SYS in them, you should locate the HIMEM.SYS file, usually under C:\DOS or C:\WINDOWS, and edit the config.sys file to contain the full path to the HIMEM.SYS file.

config.sys loads before autoexec.bat, and path statements are set in autoexec.bat, not config.sys. Without an absolute path, DOS might not find the files to load the TSRs... I think with DOS 6.22 and older, command.com is smart enough to look in C:\DOS by default, even without a path statement... but that's still a dangerous game to play

The himem.sys file needs to state it's exact path of it's location in order to be loaded in config.sys. The autoexec.bat and the path command is irrelevant to that. What version of dos do you have?

Okay, sorry for the wait, I have win3.1 currently installed and before that I had dos6.22

@mr_bigmouth_502
I have a 500mhz pentium III 510mb ram 8mb onboard ati card 16X cd-drive 2'5 floppie and an sb16.

win3.1 is NOT an OS... it runs on top of DOS... you still have DOS 6.22, there's no past tense in this!

No, I did a full format of the disk before installing win3.1

Further more, do you think we would take, dare trust the advice of a user who has only 30+ posts?

post count is irrelevant, people can have good, valid opinions regardless of their post count.

Besides, he is correct, all Windows variants before Windows 95 ran on top of DOS.

If you are installing straight from the floppies onto a blank hard drive, you should try installing DOS first then install Windows 3.1

Windows 3.1 on P3 500 I can't even understand why do so to begin with especially with so much RAM to address with. What requires such a powerful system for?

Well, I want to be able to play most games from the 90's to 00's

dosquest wrote:

Well, I want to be able to play most games from the 90's to 00's

With windows 3.1? 🙄
Best OS would be Windows 98. You would still have DOS, and everything else Windows offers.

How are you planing to run DirectX Games with 3.1?

Oh, um well... would windows 98se be a good platform?

dosquest wrote:

Oh, um well... would windows 98se be a good platform?

Yes, but that is just my opinion. I consider a Windows 3.1 machine a dead end. Windows 98 would cover all those years for DOS and Windows gaming. There are probably some limitations, but those come from the hardware you are using. It's too damn fast for early 90's. P3 500 is Q1 1999... So you get the picture...

Well, I mean mostly vga games, I have another rig for tandy/cga games (mid 80's)

Well, thanks to a mister James Davison from "NetLink" (I have no idea who this guy is or what that company is). I took the hd with windows 98 out of his former office computer (Bought it off of ebay). So, now I have win98SE with sb16 drivers and ati rage pro agp drivers. Next I need to replace the cd drive (it must be possessed because it randomly opens and closes). 😜