Possible Hard-Drive Problem?

[jacktesterson]

Hi,

I have an older machine I keep going for my fathers business, its a 266 MMX. Over the past few weeks, out of the blue (suddenly happens without doing anything) when powering the PC up, I get an explorer.exe error before anything is loaded, leaving me with a desktop background and nothing running. All I can do is shut down through alt+ctrl+del. Safe mode does the same thing. Installing Win98 SE over top of it will get it working, but that causes a mess of junk and I only do it to back stuff up...then I format and reload. This will be the third time this has happened.....all on fresh formats/installs on the same PC. Is there a way of fixing this without installing over top of the current installation or formating? Could this be a hard-drive problem?

 

[rob123171]

well first off you didnt say whether you ran scandisk or not...this should be done first
if you get errors everytime you run it then you know
another thing to check would be ram...try one stick at a time and if one acts up after you install it then you know its ram
another thing is scan for virii and or hacks
make sure your os isnt the culprit
however..if it happens even after you format like you say im betting its ram or hdd
hope ya get it worked out soon
cheers