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Restore CD won't restore

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7 replies

by jerry_tds

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I replaced the hard drive in an Aptiva 2137-E34. I manually loaded Win95, then tried to restore the OEM software from CD. When I reboot the machine, it begins to start Win98, recognizes the CD-ROM, then says "An internal stack overflow has caused this session to be halted. Change the STACKS setting in your CONFIG.SYS file, and then try again." What should the STACKS setting be? (I've tried several valid values.) Is this a fight between Win95 and Win98?

7 replies

by tim.doyle

Sounds like you may have a bad CD. The restore CD should just overwrite the entire HDD, so it doesn't matter if you have 95, XP, Linux or nothing installed...it will delete the partition and return the PC to the state it was in when you took it outof the box when new.

If you have another Aptiva restore CD try that one...otherwise check with IBM support.

by jerry_tds

Thanks, but I should have mentioned that I have 3 Aptiva Restore CDs, and they all behave exactly the same way on this machine.

by ann777

Is this CONFIG.SYS in your boot disk?

MS-DOS automatically switches stacks for some hardware interrupts to prevent stack overflow errors from occurring. The STACKS=x,y statement in the CONFIG.SYS file controls the number and size of these stacks.

The first number of the STACKS= statement specifies the number of stacks and the second number specifies the size of each stack. The default setting (if no STACKS= statement appears in the CONFIG.SYS file) is 9,128. All stack switching can be disabled by setting the entry to STACKS=0,0. In this case, MS-DOS will never switch stacks during hardware interrupts.

I'd try the default Stacks=9,128 and then see if that works.
if not increment x by 1 and try again.
if not, increment y by 64 and try again.

Keep trying until your stacks is sufficient for whichever OS is on your restore disk. If your restore disk is for Win95, then you should obtain a Win95 boot disk. It may have config.sys already properly setup with the stack sizes.

by jerry_tds

I set the Stacks to the max (64,512) and got the same error message. I'm beginning to think that the STACKS aren't really the problem: that's just the error message that was selected (at random?) to display.

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