Trouble starting windows 98SE

I have not seen this exact problem in your board and wonder if anyone has an idea.

Windows will not startwhen you turn the computer on or try to reboot. The startup seems to go fine but just before the desktop would normally show up on the screen, the system hangs. Pushing the reset button restarts the computer and when I get to the the boot choices screen I hit 2 (for bootlog.txt) and the system starts fine. Bootlog will only show a couple of errors but they are ones that are considered normal.

When this first started, I tried all the recommended processes to locate the problem. Using msconfig to eliminate one thing at a time to see if the problem would go away. I would turn off win.ini for instance and the computer would start--once! I would then try to eliminate start-up programs and the computer would start, once! I even got to where everything was turned off and it did the same thing.

I have tried downloading new drivers for all my hardware and all the other things that I could find at microsoft or other sites that even remotely seemd to be close to my problem but the problem remains.

My hard drive crashed and I had to reload windows and everything else from scratch but the problem remains. Windows will not strat on the first attempt but on reboot, hitting the selection for bootlog.txt will allow it to start.

I have an asus p4b533 mb with a pentium 4 2.0 processor.

 

Try doing a surface test on the drive from DOS. It may be a long shot, but bad clusters can have strange and varying symptoms, depending when the system tries to use them.

 

Trouble starting windws 98SE

Bsole,

I had a problem like that once.
Someone suggested it could be a problem with my USB ports.
After I unplugged my scanner from my USB port, every thing was fine.
This did not start when I first plugged the scanner in but after several weeks of use.

See if that will do the trick for you
Regards
Sven

 

Do you have a sound file associated to Windows Start-Up ?
Do you have config.sys or autoexec.bat files on your root drive ?
regards

 

Thanks for the responses

Appreciate the responses but first, the problem started before my hard drive crashed and the same problem occurs with the new drive.

The only usb device that is plugged in all the time is an all-in-one printer but the problem started before I had the printer.

The last suggestion was a sound file with the start-up. I am using a theme that does have a sound file associated but when I first replace the hard drive, the theme was not installed.

The other thing I started to say (but ran out of room on the thread) was that I have downloaded and installed new drivers for everything including my video card (a radeon all-in-wonder) and the sound drivers for the motherboard.

When I had started re installing software on the new drive and the problem showed up again, I tried reinstalling windows 2 more times but could not eliminate the problem.

Thanks for trying to help.

Bob

 

Hope you don't consider this insulting, but how long did you wait when you got to that screen where it seemed to lock up?

There have been many times when I thought 98 had quit loading, and the scrolling band at the bottom came to a dead stop, but after waiting a few minutes, it did actually boot. It must have been "thinking" about something other than the task at hand.

 

Not taken as an insult

I don't take your message as an insult. Many problems can be as simple as that and are often overlooked.

In this case I found that on a rare occasion, windows would start after a short delay. Since this has been going on for a while now, I have seen a pattern that lets me know if it is one of those times. Anymore they are exceedingly rare. I can try to start the computer and come back an hour later to find it in the same condition.

Rebooting and choosing #2 (bootlog.txt) will immediately start the system. It is very agravating!

 

I'm glad you took it that way. You know how some people are---if they have to wait 10 seconds, they're yanking the plug out of the wall.

That screen is a time when some drivers are loading. You might check for updates of the main ones, especially video. And try turning off the welcome sound if you ever get to it.

NIC card drivers and sound would probably be the next to look at. You may even want to try an earlier version if you have updated one lately.