autoexec.bat - corrupted

As a newly registered member of this board - please forgive me if this has already been covered - but I need help!

It seems that my autoexec.bat file is corrupted - when I do msconfig all i can see in autoexec.bat is unreadable characters. and when I boot I get the same characters with errors - but the boot-up continues.

does anyone have any ideas?

or do i really need autoexec.bat anyway? (not very PC literate!)

I reckon this has been caused by a virus as I have never changed autoexec.bat

Does anyone have a copy of a "standard" autoexec.bat?

 

Hi Trebor and welcome to the board !
Win98 does not normally need autoexec.bat.
Right click it, chose Rename and change .bat to .old.
Reboot
regards

 

thanks Merlin - forgive my stupidity but... do you mean in Msconfig?

thats the only place I can find it!

where is it?

thanks

 

Trebor
Open My Computer and double click on the icon for your c: drive. You'll find your autoexec.bat somewhere in the list of files. Click on it once with your right mouse button and choose rename.

As a side note, when you right click on the file you'll see an entry in the menu that says edit. If you click on it, the file will open in notepad and you should see the same thing as you see in msconfig.

 

Try using SYSEDIT.

That should show the Autoexec and other files.

I do not know if it can be renamed from there or not though.

BillyBob

 

done it!

thanks everyone!!

now if I could just stop the PC making a "hooting" noise when I power up?????.....

(could it be some sort of internal alarm for something?)

 

You won't be able to rename the file using sysedit. You could however, use it to delete all the lines in it and pretty much accomplish the same thing as renaming the file.

 

trebor (robert?)

Who knows what was in your autoexec.bat file.

If ever you create another and want to avoid your recent problem use the Create Backup feature on the General tab of msconfig. The four files will be backed up as pss files in the original's respective directories.

Alternatively, add the following line to your scanreg.ini file:

Files=30,autoexec.bat,config.sys

These two files will be included within your first boot of the day registry backup along with system.dat, user.dat, system.ini and win.ini.

We may have up to 20 files in the registry backup so up to 16 can be accomodated in addition the four default.