Custom built Athlon900 Tbird, 2 30gb IBM DeskStar 75gxp, 256 ram, oem 98se.
I've had an increasing number of times in the last 2 months or so, when on reboot it failed to get all the way to the end - comes up to an arrow cursor or arrow with hourglass, I can move them around, but no icons, no taskbar. A second reboot usually does it, often I need a third, rarely a 4th. Makes me nervous -- I'm a student and use it just all the time. I've reinstalled Windows maybe a half dozen times in my career, always with a prayer -- I've totally crashed and formatted twice by doing so. Maybe I'm clumsy.
So today I decided it's getting too dangerous to not do something. I've backed up everything, ready to close my eyes and jump. On setup.exe, it started checking the drives and came back with - can't check drives, run scandisk in MS-DOS mode. I have Norton Disk Doctor, which I regularly run, but starting a couple of months ago it ran into objections to something having to do with my 2 hard drives and the way they're partitioned with Partition Magic. I let it fix the problem it said it found, but then BootMagic had a problem with whatever NDD did to fix things. I went back to the way I had it and have just clicked "No" to NDD's question each time as to whether it should fix the problem it keeps finding each time I run it. I really don't know what's going on there, and it may have a lot to do with today's problem, but I don't know.
So I started with ScanDisk and it immediately told me the FAT copies are not the same and should be fixed. I put in the floppy for the Undo disk, and it just didn't go right. I kept hearing the floppy sound -- "dzzzt..dzzzt.." for minutes on end. So I exited and went to NDD to check things, and it also found the FAT's not all the same, and when I told it to fix it and gave it a floppy for Undo disk, it seemed go right on as if the problem was fix ed, but when it started over it came right back -- "FAT problem, want to fix it?" Endless loop, so I said No after a while, and it then found a file with an invalid time/date stamp. I agreed to let it fix and do the Undo, but it went into the same endless loop, including back to the FAT problem. Then a problem with a long filename, and the same story - fixing it doesn't fix it. I'm caught in an endless loop of endless loops, and at the end of it all, Windows won't let me reinstall until I clean things up and I can't clean things up.
Does any of this give any of you a clue? I'm REALLY nervous now.
Thanks a lot
I've had an increasing number of times in the last 2 months or so, when on reboot it failed to get all the way to the end - comes up to an arrow cursor or arrow with hourglass, I can move them around, but no icons, no taskbar. A second reboot usually does it, often I need a third, rarely a 4th. Makes me nervous -- I'm a student and use it just all the time. I've reinstalled Windows maybe a half dozen times in my career, always with a prayer -- I've totally crashed and formatted twice by doing so. Maybe I'm clumsy.
So today I decided it's getting too dangerous to not do something. I've backed up everything, ready to close my eyes and jump. On setup.exe, it started checking the drives and came back with - can't check drives, run scandisk in MS-DOS mode. I have Norton Disk Doctor, which I regularly run, but starting a couple of months ago it ran into objections to something having to do with my 2 hard drives and the way they're partitioned with Partition Magic. I let it fix the problem it said it found, but then BootMagic had a problem with whatever NDD did to fix things. I went back to the way I had it and have just clicked "No" to NDD's question each time as to whether it should fix the problem it keeps finding each time I run it. I really don't know what's going on there, and it may have a lot to do with today's problem, but I don't know.
So I started with ScanDisk and it immediately told me the FAT copies are not the same and should be fixed. I put in the floppy for the Undo disk, and it just didn't go right. I kept hearing the floppy sound -- "dzzzt..dzzzt.." for minutes on end. So I exited and went to NDD to check things, and it also found the FAT's not all the same, and when I told it to fix it and gave it a floppy for Undo disk, it seemed go right on as if the problem was fix ed, but when it started over it came right back -- "FAT problem, want to fix it?" Endless loop, so I said No after a while, and it then found a file with an invalid time/date stamp. I agreed to let it fix and do the Undo, but it went into the same endless loop, including back to the FAT problem. Then a problem with a long filename, and the same story - fixing it doesn't fix it. I'm caught in an endless loop of endless loops, and at the end of it all, Windows won't let me reinstall until I clean things up and I can't clean things up.
Does any of this give any of you a clue? I'm REALLY nervous now.
Thanks a lot
