Boot Up problem

[jdunn]

Attempting to trak down a boot up problem

At what part of the boot up process does the Win98 Splash screen appear?


If the Operating system isn't loaded is the hard drive bad or does it mean the BIOS is corrupted?

[Murf]

Exactly where is it hanging? Did you recently format and or partition the hard drive? What exactly is the problem, then we can help????

What are you seeing on the screen? Need more detail....

[jdunn]

The computer starts but the operating system never loads. It stops at a blinking curser. It's a Compaq Laptop (an old one) so I think the problem is in the chip set or corrupted BIOS.

[VirtualMe]

I'd lean towards hard drive going bad.


Can you boot up in safe mode, by any of these METHODS (http://home.earthlink.net/~steventc/tech101/boottosafemode.htm)?

[ted22j]

I think the splash screen displays while the various drivers and the kernel are loaded into system memory. I agree with Virtual...try to get to Safe Mode. I believe you hold the Shift and F5 or F8 keys down during the boot process to get to Safe Mode. If you can't boot to Safe Mode, you are probably looking at reformatting and reloading again.

[ted22j]

I seriously doubt your bios is corrupted unless you picked up a rather nasty virus. There are a couple of free utilities that will give you some degree of protection against this. One is at www. analogx.com called Script Defender. The other is ScripTrap by Robin Keir.

[Murf]

If the O/S never loads and you get the initial post screen (the one that does the memory count and shows the BIOS, then it hangs, there is something wrong with one of the settings in your CMOS. Compaq, once you see the curser blinking hit F10 and it should get you into CMOS (SETUP).

If you get in try loading system defaults and doing a auto detect of the IDE drives. SAVE & EXIT and see what happens.