[lug] OT but desperate (win 98 won't boot)

[Ben Luey]

This is totally off topic, but I'm desparte -- I destored a friend's
windows '98 computer:

Current problem: Computer hangs on startup (at the splash screen) I tried
restoring old registery backups, but no luck. So since I had tried
everything else, I decided to install a new copy windows 98 on the hard
drive. Booted off the cd, told windows to install to a new directory. The
install went fine.  Then it said rebooting windows 98 and then it crashes
at the splash screen just as before. What could be wrong / how can I fix
this without formating the hard drive and deleting everything.

How this happened: All upgrades of IE5.0 caused the computer to hang right
before showing the taskbar and loading the icons. I didn't know this and I
installed the encryption patch for IE50. Rebooted and I got this problem
of a hang with a blank screen (background color) but not icons or taskbar.
So I rebooted again and the computer worked (but IE still didn't work for
https) computer seemed fine and I turned on file sharing, restarted as
instructed and got the same problem. Then I rebooted and the problem
didn't fix itself, so I went in to safe mode and turned off file and
printer sharing, but same problem. If I hit f8 at startup and did step by
step confirmation, then the computer crashed when it started loading the
registery settings (first thing it did). I then restored an old copy of
the registery by running scanreg /restore from a safemode command prompt.
The computer then crashed at the splash screen for win98 if I did normal
mode -- safe mode still worked and reflected the changed registery. I went
back to the original registery settings and it still got hung at the
splash screen.

There must be some corrupt file that even the fresh install of windows is
using and causing the crash -- any ideas. My friends has all this data on
the drive and a usb network card so no networking support in safe mode and
no cd-burned and its a mess.

Thank you very very much for any help / ideas / suggestions, hints on
where to get help, etc, etc,

Ben




Ben Luey
lueyb at jilau1.colorado.edu