Mayday! Win98 won't boot anymore!

Hi,

I was playing online games on GameSpy just now, and rebooted my machine because I had terminated a game with Ctrl/ALt/DEL - Terminate task (for some reason, quitting Unreal Tournament never properly returned me to Gamespy, and I had to reconnect to the Gamespy service manually) and then could not log into Gamespy anymore. Thought a reboot may help.

After rebooting, Win98 started to load, and suddenly I was dumped to the "you can now shut off your computer" screen. This now happens whenever I try to boot. I can boot in safe mode, but wouldn't know what to do there. Could that be a virus I caught? Or a hardware glitch on the motherboard? Please help!

Just before the above described Unreal Tournament session, I installed the latest NVidia Detonator drivers (43.45), and then performed a defrag on the partition containing the Win98 files.

Historically I may add: In the past, I've had a small problem where Win98 would not power down completely to the "you can now shut off your computer" screen. It would get hung in limbo with a black screen, and I had to shut the power off. On restart, I'd then have to wait through a Scandisk, which never found anything to be wrong.

I have:
Motherboard: ASRock K7VT2;
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+;
Harddisk: 60 GB IBM;
Graphics: Asus 8420 (GeForce TI 4200);
Sound: Soundblaster Live 5.1 Retail;
Win 98 SE in dual boot configuration with Win2000, all boot info in a small C:/ partition, Win98 on D:/, Win2000 on G:/;
ADSL Internet connection via a DLink D-804, the above machine declared as DMZ

Thanks for any ideas you may have.

Hannes

 

Hi, Just a guess ...
I would suspect that there are errors in the HDD boot sectors.
Do you have a floppy to boot from (always a good idea ;-))
If so boot from it and type
scandisk
If no floppy, boot to safe mode then Start Button/Run and type
scandisk

regards

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I have executed scandisk, no erros found, and no effect on the problem, unfortunately

 

OK so no windows!

Do this!

Cleanup
This is for 95 98 ME only!

Boot to DOS (not shutdown to DOS). While booting hit F8 to startup menu. Chose "command prompt only ".

Type these commands exactly hit enter at the end (do not type the notes that are in parenthesis like this).

del c:\*.swp (may get file not found, is ok)
del c:\windows\*.swp
deltree c:\windows\shelli*.*
deltree c:\windows\temp\*.* (answer yes to all) "ALL "
deltree c:\windows\tempor~1\*.*
deltree c:\windows\history\*.*
deltree c:\windows\spool\printers\*.*

When finished hit CTRL ALT DEL to reboot the computer.

Try safe mode first on way back up.

Mike

 

Dear mflynn and merlin,

Thanks for your helpful suggestions. I finally did use the scanreg /restore as suggested by others in a different forum, and I'm back up running again. I was hesitating to use it since I didn't want to loose that Detonator installation which I would have by restoring a registry from before the installation. Together with the Detonator update I also installed a few game updates.

I have now (after restoring the registry) reupdated the Detonator, but don't know whether I should retry the game updates. There's now possibly a mismatch between the game files and the corresponding registry entries. Sheesh. Ultimately, I have a feeling I'm about to need a reinstall of Windows98, with all the reinstallation of umpteen prorams and the update hunting that comes with that.

Best

Hannes

 

A little history of my own ( not good ) with Nvidia Drvers.

The newest and latest and supposedly greatest are not always the best

With this machine and one other and Win FE or 98 SE I had to run Nvidia drivers two or three generations old.

A little hint for you from my experience.

Unless something IS NOT working, leave the Nvidia drivers alone.

They ARE VERY FUSSY about installation. And some of them WILL NOT work properly unless ALL previous ones are removed and the video set back to a standard VGA setup. And Windows restarted at least twice before trying the new.

In fact this machine ( XP Pro ) was not the best video wise until I got the WHQL drivers from the Windows Update.

And also from reading your post I see a possibility that you may have upgraded too many thing too quickly.

BillyBob

 

I have to agree with BillyBob. If you had just installed the drivers before playing the game and then the crash occurred it is most likely the cause of the problem. You might try the game again with the new drivers installed but I'd first back up the registry, just in case. Were you having any problems before the new drivers were installed? If not, I'd go back to the old and most likely save myself a bunch of trouble.

 

And this includes a MANUAL regedit and removal of ALL Nvidia references in the C:\Windows\inf\other folder. Especially if the new ones did not install properly.

If these are not removed the system will ( or may try to ) use them instead of the new ones.

BillyBob

 

Please note path correction in my previous reply.

It should be

C:\Windows\Inf\Other

BB