Win 98 Freezing on Flash Screen

[Juano11]

Hey guys,

I'm working with my girlfriend's old gateway laptop. It's got Win98 (unknown edition). That's about all that I know about it.

What's happening is this:

When you try to start it up, everything progresses just fine until you get the the Win98 flash screen. Then there is a *click* *click* *click* **pause** *click* *click* *click* sound from either the HDD of the floppy drive (it's hard to discern which) and then the boot process stops. The screen stays up and the little scrolling graphic on the bottom of the screen contiues, but it just doesn't go anywhere.

I'm running scandisk as I type this, but when I left it looked like that may have frozen as well.

Any thoughts?

[degsy]

Can you get into Safemode?
Are you doing a Scan from DOS?

If the BIOS is loosing the drive during an operation like that then it could be a faulty motherboard or battery.

[Juano11]

I was doing the scandisk from DOS.

Strangely, after the first scan froze, I powered off the computer. Upon re-booting, it automatically ran scan disk, and started up just fine. ???

There was no mention of errors while runnnig the second scan, but I don't know if it would alert me to that or not.

I could not get into safe mode while we were having the problem.

I'm running a virus scan now (though I feel that that is an unlikely source).

Degs, do you mean a bad main battery or a bad battery on the MoBo?

I don't think that the problem is fixed. She was using it earlier today and it shut down on its own and when it tried to restart she got an "operating system not found" message. After restarting again, we got to the point where I started this post.

Thanks

[degsy]

I mean a motherboard battery.

If it is then it is a cheap fix.
If it is the motherboard its self then it's a new mobo :(

I had a mobo once that kept loosing the drives. I initially though that it was the battery as the BIOS would detect the drives, but then loose them after about 10 mins.

It turned out to be a faulty mobo.

[renegade600]

Is it still freezing or does the problems seem to have gone away? Have you tried the floppy to see if it is reading okay?

[Juano11]

It ran for about 20 minutes and then shut down and now won't restart again. I thought that I might try to reinstall Win98 since there is no important data on the drive. The install progressed to the point where scandisk again came up to check the drive prior to installation. This eventually froze, repeatedly, when it got to 3% while scanning the directory structure (or substructure).

I've even tried "format c:" the cursor advances to the next line, but then it just sits there, nothing happens. I does recognize the drive. "dir" shows me the contents of the drive.

Any more thoughts? I found the CMOS battery online for $18. I haven't ordered it yet. Though I probably will soon. Much more $$$ than that probably isn't worth dumping into this computer.

Thanks, you guys are very helpful

[degsy]

I would think that it would be either

1) CMOS battery
2) Faulty motherboard
3) Faulty IDE cable
4) Faulty HDD

The cheapest things to try are a new battery and a new IDE cable.
If you have a spare HDD you could try that.

Otherwise it's a more major & expensive solution.