boot problem

[fc3646]

My local volunteer fire department is having a problem with their computer and asked me if I could help them. I went to look at it and it's win 98 machine, generic case. I didn't open it up yet. Upon starting it says the following:
"While initializing device VKD:
Windows protection error. Y

An internal stack overflow has casued this session to be halted. Change the STACKS setting in your config.sys file, and then try again."

That's it. I can't do anything, other than hit the reset button and get the same screen

Any ideas, I'd like to help them out if I can....

[Cricket]

Try another keyboard and see if the error message goes away.

Cricket

[cuffs007]

Yep, it's most likely the keyboard... try unplugging the one you have and plugging it back in first (power OFF)... if not, try another as Cricket had suggested...

you can tell the guys at the station you learned that from:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;263318

good luck

[GaryRouth]

If unplugging/replugging or changing keyboards doesn't help, I seen instances where it's just luck that a hard drive developing bad sectors (or other sources of data corruption) happens to corrupt that file. You can try a "thorough" run of ScanDisk, though to be able to run it you may have to boot from a bootdisk or bootable cd (since the normal boot is going to give you the keyboard error). You can also try looking inside the case to see what hard drive is installed, downloading the diagnostics from the manufacurer's website (the downloads creat a bootable disk that the diagnostics run from), and testing the drive.

Hopefully it's just the keyboard!
. . . Gary

[ might want to run a thorough antivirus scan too - Norton 2003 will run from a bootable cd. And if you keep seeing the stack errors, this article has some settings for config.sys that can help http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;145799 ]