win98 won't load

I have an old machine (gateway circa 1999, win98, pentium III, 450 Mhz, 128 mb) that was sitting in my basement. A local club was looking for old computer equipment so I thought I would give this to them. Before I put it in the basement a year ago, I loaded win xp home edition on it. The mchine held it but it was slow. I was getting a new machine anyway, so the old one went into the basement. When the club came looking, I went ahead and uninstalled xp on the old machine and hoped they could use it with win98. Something between the uninstall of xp and reinstall of win98 messed things up. I cannot get win98 to fully load. It appears it goes through setup, all of the files load and the system restarts. It's after the restart that the process gets to a screen that shows the windows logo with "windows getting ready for use the first time" written on the bottom of the screen. I can wait all day and nothing happens after that. Any ideas on what might be causing this, why it's hanging up, and what I can do? Thanks.

 

I suggest you get the drive setup utilities from the drive manufacturer's website. Remove the current partition/s and reform them, then format in FAT32. With some utilities you can backup and delete the MBR, this may also be a solution.

It would most likely be having trouble with hardware, so after that I would open the case, pull out and reseat the RAM, video card and drive connectors. Remove any added hardware like PCI cards until you get Windows up and running.

Matt

 

It seems to me that when XP installed itself and went back to Win98, it copied C:\System.1st to C:\Windows\System.Dat. In other words, it took the very first registry created when Win98 was first installed, and overwrote the correct one.
Three possible solutions:
1. Do an overlay install of 98.
2. Format the drive, and do a clean install of 98.
3. Extract System.Dat from one of the registry backups located in C:\Windows\Sysbckup
How to do this:
Boot the computer with a Win98 boot floppy, choose without CDrom support when prompted. Do this command at the prompt.
dir c:\windows\sysbckup\rb*.cab
You should now see a listing of 5 to 6 files, along with dates they were created. Note the name of the older file. If you have a file named Rbbad.Cab, ignore this one. The one you want has a name like Rb001.Cab. or any other number such as 002, 003, 004, 005, or 000. Use the last number in place of the X in the below commands.
Then do these commands.
c:
cd\windows
attrib -r -h -s system.dat (NOTE: this command appears to do nothing when done correctly)
extract /y c:\windows\sysbckup\rb00X.cab system.dat
You should get the message that "1 file(s) was extracted ". Take out floppy and reboot.