Okay, I have never encountered anything like this before, and I've installed Windows 9x on this PC a few times before and never got this, so this is new territory for me. Anyway, every time install Windows 98SE on this computer and it comes time to reboot to the desktop, it halts and claims that VMM32.VXD is missing.

At first I figured it was a fluke, you know, its 17 year old hardware, can't expect perfection, but it happened again and again, I then gave up on 98SE and figured I'd settle for plain old 98, and the same error happened.

I spent a while googling around, but well...finding information on errors and trouble shooting from that long ago is getting kind of difficult. I found some ancient forums, and other stuff...but no concrete solutions. But I was able to download VMM32.VXD from one of the many .dll sites, and I also got the one from my 98SE CD, and put each on a floppy disk.

Finally, what I did was boot into safemode, and attempt to put the VMM32.VXD files into the System folder they are supposed to be in. But, naturally, this is safe mode so the Floppy drive can't be used. Then I used a windows 98 boot disk to put myself into a CLI environment. It took a couple of tries but I figured out the CLI commands to move one of the VMM32.VXD files to the appropriate place (or at least where windows had previously stated the file belonged) I tried this for both the VMM32.VXD files individually. Each time Windows still reported that they were missing....

So now I'm kind of stumped, and can't think of what to do next other than to try a different hard drive. Only problem is that....well its kind of embarrassing, but I've opened the case so much that now the screws are kind of stuck, they just spin in place when I try to take them out, maybe if I use needle nose pliers, whatever that's beyond the point. 😵

TLDR

Does anyone have any experience with VMM32.VXD issues, and if so what did you do about it.