need help - Windows won't load!

[bobo180]

hi,
i need help. Windows98SE won't load up all of a sudden. i would get to the Windows98 splash screen and then the computer would freeze. the blue and white bar at the bottom of the screen would freeze and my keyboard stops responding. the only thing to do is a hard reboot. then i get into scandisk and it freezes at 19% everytime. can't run in Safe Mode because it will still go to scandisk and freeze. exiting scandisk will cause the computer to freeze at a black screen with a blinking underscore at the top-left. please help. i will worship you if you can fix my computer.

here are the specs:

Athlon Thunderbird 1.33 GHz
Asus A7V133 motherboard
384MB PC100 RAM
GeForce2 GTS/Pro 64MB
Sound Blaster Live!

can it be the RAM? my board is running at 133 MHz DRAM Frequency but the manual says it supports PC100's. can't seem to change the DRAM Frequency in the BIOS. only 133 MHz is selectable.

 

[altonb1]

Are you SURE it is completely locked-up?

I would guess that you have problem with your hard drive. why are you suggesting RAM? if scandisk runs to 19% then freezes, it might be stuck attempting to read that section of the disk. Because of this, I asked whether you were sure it was locked-up. You could have a failing hard drive, a bad sector/block...whatever. when booting, hit F8 to get the windows boot menu. Boot to Safe mode command prompt, THEN run scandisk. Do it before you go to bed. Do it right before you go eat dinner, whatever. Just make sure you give it plenty of time to run so that you can definitively state that it is locking up and not just slowing to a crawl and not responding to key strokes in real-time.

By bypassing scandisk, you are letting Windows find the problem when it attempts to read a system file or some other file from there instead of allowing scandisk to discover the problem and attempt to repair it first.

It is very possible that you are having another hardware issue, but see if it is just a problem on the disk first. I had a similar problem ponce and it was only after letting scandisk run for an extended period of time that I found the disk had a huge section of cross-linked files or something that scandisk needed to repair. I thought it was completely locking up at first, too.

 

[DaiShan]

yeah let scandisk run for a really long time before you decide it is locked up, if that doesn't work I would suggest downloading the diagnostic program for your hdd from your hdd manufacturer and "flagging" any bad sectors it finds.

 

[bobo180]

yea, i'm pretty sure it locks up. i just tried what you said and ran scandisk after starting up in command prompt only. it freezes at 6% in directory structure. i have a WD1000 and for some reason i can't run the diagnostic program. it boots me out to the main menu if i try running the diagnostic. this happens before i bumped into this problem. i would still like to know if this sounds like it could be caused by a RAM issue.

edit: oh yea, it sat at 6% for more than 30 min. after a while the num-lock even stops functioning and ctrl+alt+del no longer works. i believe the last thing i did before the problems started was telling Windows to handle my Virtual Memory.