Windows 98 won't boot normal and doesn't see CD-ROM drives

[Tromos]

Working on a friend's machine. His power supply fan motor burned out. After replacing the PS, I tried to boot the machine (he's running Win98). The machine locks up during Windows load. Doing a step-by-step, I noticed that the lockup occurs after loading the dfs.vxd file. Not sure if this is causing the problem, but after attempting to load that file, I just get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.

I am able to successfully boot into Win98 Safe Mode, but even when I do that, the OS does not see the CD-ROM drives. The BIOS correctly detects them on boot and I can use the Win98 startup disk to boot with CD-ROM support and the drives are recognized just fine.

Suggestions on either problem? Why won't Win98 load normally and what could cause the OS to not see the CD-ROM drives?

Thanks.

 

[chsh1ca]

Boot into safe mode, and use sfc to make sure the files weren't corrupted. It should warn you about dfs.vxd if it's gotta be replaced, and will probably ask you for the CD. If the 98 cabfiles aren't on the hard drive then boot up with a floppy with CD-rom support, stick in the Win98 CD and copy the .CAB files onto the hard drive, and then reboot into Safe Mode and run sfc again. When it asks you for the CD, just enter in the local hard drive path, and it should replace the files and allow you to reboot normally.

Let us know how it goes.