Computer froze due to lack of memory-now Win 98 won't start

Hi! Please help - my computer has crashed (along w/ school-work)!

I was working on my computer, using Win 98, and it was working fine. While waiting for a page to load, I recieved an error message saying it couldn't perform that operation b/c there wasn't enough memory. My computer all of the sudden went into DOS. I put in my rescue disk and tried running scandisk on everything, but it didn't help. I just have a DOS screen waiting for me to type something into "A:\> ", but I don't know what to type. I also tried restarting in safe mode; I typed in choice "3" for "safe mode" but I just get the "A:> ". Please help!

Darleen

 

Hi Daisyshook - welcome to BBS

aaargh oh dear

a couple of things to help us get started:

"your rescue disk" is this a floppy disk? or some CD which came with the computer (some makes have a purpose-made CD which is meant to "rescue" you)

assuming that it's a floppy (more likely):
when you boot with the floppy in the A: drive, do you get a menu with 3 choices along the lines of
1 Start with CD ROM support
2 Start without CDROM
3 View help file

if not, let us know what you see pls...

and, what make of computer pls

best wishes, HJ

 

computer crashed

Hi and thanks for responding!

Yes, I see the 3 choices. It's a floppy that I made at some point in the past (maybe when I reformatted a yr ago...?)
My computer is a Hewlitt Packard Pavilion 6545C with an Intel Celeron 500mhz processor, 13gb hard drive, and 128 megs of ram.

I hope you can help me save my schoolwork!!

Darleen

 

What messages do you get if you try to start the computer without the floppy in?

 

Without the floppy it says "Invalid system disk, Replace the disk and then press any key "

Darleen

 

Boot from the floppy disk and at the a: prompt type "sys c:" (without the quotes) and then press enter. You won't see much happen but when you do it if you don't receive an error of some type and you end up back at the a: prompt you can assume it worked. Then remove the floppy and try booting from the hard disk. At the very least you should end up at a c: prompt. Let us know what happens.

 

I got error messages with sys c, but someone told me to type in the drive I wanted followed by a colon and a backslash (just like the A prompt is typed) and press enter. It worked! I typed D:\, enter, and it brought up the D prompt. So I put my Windows CD in and it's installing it on top of my old copy right now. I'll let you know how it goes...
Thanks for all you guys' help! (I hope this works)
Darleen

 

Well, I ended up getting an error message after restarting during setup that says there was a missing file "ndiswan.vxd ". From what I read, this has to do with dial up networking - which I don't need. No matter how I tried to get around it, it wouldn't complete setup b/c of it. I tried starting setup over and over and it still didn't work. At this point, I don't care if I lose my files so I'm trying to install Windows XP. Apparently there was no way of getting around losing everything b/c when I had to choose whether to partition, delete existing partition, etc., I didn't have enough space to do anything but delete the existing one and start over. Oh well, I hope this works! I'm waiting for it to format the partition right now. If anyone has any input, I'd certainly appreciate any help I can get!
Darleen

 

I installed XP and it's working great!

 

Thanks for posting how it is going, enjoy!