Need help with old Win98 machine

[Hani]

Hello,

I'm having some problems with my cousin's system. It's a POS Celeron 400 on a generic AT mobo with onboard sound and video, a 6GB Samsung HD, 96MB PC100 SD-RAM, 36x CD-ROM and a floppy drive. Anyway, he said he was playing games, when the system hanged. He restarted and got this error:

While intializing NTKERN:
Windows Protection Error. Please restart.

Same error in both safe mode and normal. I formatted the HD and tried to re-install Win98, but after the "Setup is preparing to install Windows" reaches 100% it gives several errors and aborts. I installed the HD in my system, and was able to proceed with the installation. After copying files it restarted. I turned off my system, pulled the HD, and put it back in my cousin's machine to complete installation and hardware identification. Guess what? It gave me the same error!

What wrong? How can I fix this? I tried removing a 64mb RAM stick and left the 32mb, same thing. I also loaded the BIOS defualts, nothing helped.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Bartman39]

I think this might help you...

BTW your headed in the right direction...

 

[bendixG15]

Can't give specific help except that a google search of ...ntkern.... gives
lots of hits on fixing problem.
Good Luck from another old WIN98 box

 

[mitchelt]

When I had that SAME problem 2 weeks ago, I tracked it down to a USB 2.0 PCI card DRIVERS.

The PC was working fine until I installed the USB Card.

I re-installed WIN98SE, but as soon as I loaded the drivers for the USB card and rebooted...WHAM...NTKERN error.

I removed the drivers and the card and the PC is working fine.

 

[Hani]

Well, I removed the 32mb stick, and kept the 64mb one, and it worked! Thanks a lot guys.