Win 98 boot up problems resurfaced

mrblack

Hi,

two weeks ago my pc stopped booting up to W98. It would proceed to the point where windows started to load but then instead of the password screen appearing the pc would reboot itself in safe mood. When I tried to reboot in normal mode all I got was the Blue screen of Death. From the system menu in control panel there was no obvious problem and so I did a full hard disk scan which showed up multiple errors. So off I went to maplins and got a new HDD and reinstalled W 98 and d/l all the updates. I also run norton AV and firewall and regularly do liveupdates.
The W98 reinstall worked fine until last night when the system started showing the exact same problem as before and reinstalling everything again is going to be a royal pain. Wondering if anyone has any suggestions/shortcuts.

Dun

Try re-starting the computer, hitting F8 to bring up the Startup menu, and choose step by step confirmation, and see what it reaches when it blue screens. What error message do you get on the bsod? It sounds hardware related, since it's a new install and the same things happening.

Capt'n Midnight

If you reinstall on top of the previous windows you should inherit the existing settings. If there was a problem with the settings then you also inherit it. Reinstalling will fix corrupt files - will NOT fix a corrupt registry.

If during the reinstall you said NO to overwrite existing files then next time you would say YES (on the basis you've nothing to loose )

In safe mode set back to 16 colours to see if video problem, use autoruns from ntinternals web site to remove startup junk.

boot to command prompt only, type in win /?
try WIN /D:FSVX to see if this works (if not then look at config.sys/autoexec.bat)

In safe mode you could uninstall the most recently added prog - (only if problems happened since it installed)

The Muppet

Interesting you mention Live updates have you done this since the reinstall, you could have a goggled to see if theres any issues with any updates you've loaded.
Could also be the start of hardware failure, The video driver loads at about the stage you are saying the crash occurs.

mrblack

Right I am back to this problem now. I have booted up many times and unfortunately the CD rom drive does not work in Safe mode so I can't reinstall the graphics or soundcard drivers or even Winows. So I have looked at the bootlog file and the first error in the log is this:

Loadfail =c:\windows\fonts\marlett\.ttf failure code = 0016

There are a about 10 more failures all related to fonts it seems after the above line.

I am going to google on this error code now.

BTW is it normal for W98 safe mode not to have the CD rom drive Working?

Muppet I have rebooted step by step a few times and each time it fails to boot even if I say No to run Symantec and Norton so I think that these may not be the problem.

Thx

mrblack

Went into the Windows fonts directory and saw that A Sansserrif font was in there twice-deleted one. Then went into appearance and reduced colours to 16 as Muppett said and the good news is that the system boots up now but the screen and fonts all look v bad. But at least it works well enough so I can work on figuring out the problem.

thx lads

The Muppet

Captain Midnight told you to go to 16 colours.

It Looks like either you have a dodgy display adapter or the driver for same is corrupted or has a conflict. Is there any red or yellow flags on anything in the device manager. You could try removing the display adapter from your system devices in the control panel and rebooting the system and reinstall the Video driver.