Initializing device IOS error on Boot

[stegic]

Hi!
My father is running a 1GHz Athlon system with Win98 on it. He installed some software, and after removing it (for reasons I won't go into here) needed to reboot. He received a warning that the application he installed generated an exception fault, and that the system needed to be rebooted. It went into safe mode. After trying to reboot the system again, he gets the following error just after the Windows screen, as it is starting to boot:

While initializing device IOS:
ERROR: Real mode system memory allocation failed.

If he switches off, and starts up again it goes into safe mode. If he tries to get out of safe mode, he gets this message above. I've searched the Microsoft Knowledge base, but things come up for Win95 and not win98. Any ideas on a solution here?

 

[JuanH]

Things that apply to 95 usually apply to 98 as well (pretty dosshell!). How much memory do you have installed? Any chance it went south? If you do a search on google you can even find experts exchange topics on it.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Win98/Q_20078270.html

(MsShadow's post)

 

[stegic]

The machine has 512MB of RAM, so I don't think it's the memory! 2 256MB chips, perhaps one of them isn't seated correctly or one died? I saw the article you referred to... didn't seem to be answering the question. I will ask my dad to check the seating of the RAM and experiment with taking a chip out. If there are any other suggestions, please let me know!

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

boot to dos and type scanreg /restore and choose a date prior to installing this software

 

[jmatt]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q263466