HELP!!!!!!! Computer is froze up!!!

[kater1]

I am running a Trinity S1598 V1.04a with a K6-III 400, 64 meg ram, a Matrox video card, and Sound blaster 16 sound card. Bios is Award Modular V4.51pg.

I went to start my computer, has worked fine for 5-6 months, and it hangs right before the screen that show it looking for a boot disk in a: drive. The a: drive light stays on and also the HDD light is on. I can put in a windows 98 boot disk and it will let me boot to a a: prompt. I can not get it to run in safe mode or do a step by step confermation.

I changed the boot order to c: first and still hangs at same screen.

Any ideals??

thanks

Bill

 

[cavingjan]

Sounds like some damaged files. Have you run a scan disk on the drive?

 

[kater1]

I ran scan disk off of the boot disk. It found alot of damaged files. Still don't boot up though. I just can't figure it out.

 

[John]

can you see your c: and or other partitions thru DOS?

 

[kater1]

I can get into c: using the boot disk with no problem

 

[Muadib]

Sounds like your hard drive is going bye-bye. Does scandisk ever finish when you run it on the c drive? If it does finish, run it again on the c drive. It should finsh with little or no errors.

 

[Tominator]

At th A: prompt type
Sys C:

That might get you up and running.

 

[kater1]

okay, heres the deal.

I typed in "SYS c:" at a: prompt.
Now the puter will boot-up without a disk in a drive BUTTTTTT, you can not boot up into safe mode. Gives an invalide page fault in explore error. When trying to boot into normal I get; "Reg not found", "cannot find XMS", and "cannot find system.ini", "Run setup again"

I try to run setup with a win98 cd and it says a operating system is already installed, use win98 upgrade. I try my win98 upgrade cd and the key code won't work.

Anyone got a gun, about time to shoot-it!!!!!!!!

 

[Grasshopper]

Since you are already considering to do Win98 install, I suggest that you repartition your hard drive, format the drive and do a fresh install off of the retail version of the CD that you have. It looks like your system files were corrupted or deleted when you ran scandisk, and told it to fix errors.

Anyhow, also make sure that your cables are connected tight in your MB and HD and check for power in HD. If I were you, I would install Win98 with minimum components (JUST A video card and a harddisk and a CDROM) and once the installation goes fine, add rest of your components and drivers for it.

Hope this helps.

 

[Muadib]

Are you using the same key that was on the pc? It checks the registry, and if the keys don't match it won't install.

 

[kater1]

HEY HEY HEY, got this thing going, I forgot which code key I had used to load win98, found it in the back of the cabinet. Went thru setup agian and everything works. I lost all my desktop icons and shortcuts but as far as I can tell all the information is still on the hard disk. Time will only tell.

thanks for all the help and suggestions

kater1@midwest.net