Ancient Emachine...

[LostElf]

Forgive me if this is in the wrong area, or if a few things aren't the clearest.. Its been a few hours too many without sleep ^_~
I'll save the long and drawn out details of it all (at this point I'm so annoyed with it I could rant for hours..), but the gist of my troubles is that I'm dealing with a very old Emachine (etower 500ix) with a Win98 OS. Aside from being more than a tad behind the times, the cursed thing is so full of spyware and viruses the only option I really have is to wipe it clean and start anew. The problem is that Emachines has apparently safeguarded against that sort of thing. It refuses to notice when I have a MaxBlaster disk in the drive, or anything that could potentially make the OS go away. During the bootup sequence when *normal* computers would be flashing all of the standard info, this thing instead has a white screen with Emachines plastered across it that just inspires one to look at it blankly and repeat "One of Us" over and over again. So I have no clue what's going on in its evil little mind.
Does anyone have any experience with turning Emachines into normal computers? I attempted to find answers at their website, but didn't find anything useful. Is there some sort of trick to bypass all the Emachine junk, and allow one to reformat? Is there any hope for this, or should I just gut the thing for useful parts (if there are even any...>.<) in a fit of sadistic rage?
Guh. Any input would be greatly, greatly, greatly appreciated. ^^;;

[riv.j]

First, the obvious question: have you tried removing the viruses and spyware with anti-virus and anti-spyware software? You don't sound like a complete novice, so I presume that you know there are free versions of both (e.g., AVG and Ad-aware) available to download from the Net.

Second, I think that MaxBlast will only work with Maxtor hard-drives. Are you sure that this is the make of your hard-drive? Does your computer recognise any boot floppy disk? If so, then you could re-format your drive with the Microsoft utility Fdisk.

Third, I am not certain how to disable your Emachines boot screen, but you might be able to find out what is going on at boot-up by pressing F8 and then selecting "step-by-step confirmation" of startup items. You can also, of course, examine your Config.sys, Autoexec.bat and Boot.log files in Notepad.

Finally, I am not an expert on Win98 (having upgraded directly from Win95 to WinXP), but whenever I used to re-install Win95, which I understand is not too different from Win98, I never bothered with re-formatting the hard-drive, but simply renamed the Windows directory "WinOld" (or "WinCrap", if I was particularly angry about Microsoft's inability to produce a decent operating system that didn't need re-installing every five minutes), and installed a new Windows directory, with the all-important new and clean Registry, from the Win95 CD. Any programs that needed to be registered in order to function, had to be re-installed, of course, but I found that this method saved me a lot of time and effort, since I could then copy any data that I needed (such as Start Menu folders and shortcuts and Internet favourites) to the new Windows directory from the old before deleting it.

[zipulrich]

Welcome to both of you, and riv.j has some nice advice. Remember too that F8 should get you into Safe Mode, which is a great place to start. I believe there's an option in the BIOS to do away with the eMachine splash as well.

Post back when you're not in such a mellow mood.

[LostElf]

^.^ Thanks for the speedy responses. Sorry I was so vague last night, but I was a bit more than irked.
First of all, yeah, I've done all I can to attempt to remove the spyware and viruses. However, we're talking a computer that never had any anti-virus program of any type since I first became aware of that fact about three weeks ago. This computer has been abused. We're also talking about a computer that has AOL. No antivirus and AOL.*nothing* works. I managed to get a spyware buster onto the system, but after identifying 213 the system locked up and I had to restart. In addition, I couldn't even get Norton onto the system. Couldn't successfully download it (didn't have an updated version of IE, and I can't stay on the internet on that system for more than about three minutes--only has a 56k modem, no dsl or fun stuff, of course)
Next, yep, the harddrive I'm dealing with is in fact a Maxtor. ^^;; Should have mentioned that, rather than leaving myself to look like an idiot trying to make toast in boiling water.
Oh, and no, it doesn't seem to notice any boot disk at all. >.<
F8 allowed me to see even more of this emachine insanity. Tried that too. Though I'm going to see if I can explore more fully to see if theres anything. I didn't have much of a chance to look through everything before the fan became an issue (It started making sounds that my cat does before spewing a hairball...so my focus went to that.)
Ah, upgrading..yeah, that was my first dream. I happen to have a Win98 upgrade disk, and I thought it would be a simple matter of popping the thing in and watching all the troubles go away. Nope-apparently this system had a more 'up to date' version than what I had, so that was no good. Then I thought, hey, lets put 2000 on it. Ha! Nope. This system was made when Win98 was shiny and new, so it can't handle an upgrade.
Another problem I've come across is that I do manage to do anything with the danged thing, I don't have any of the driver stuff. If this computer came with any disks/information booklets/etc, they were tossed long ago. Though I could just track that stuff down on the net. Its just a bit of a pain. ::sigh::
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions. ^^ Gonna try a few of the things mentioned and see what I come up with.

[smurfy]

Hi there.
A few things to try in the boot process.

- Pressing any of the usual BIOS entry keys while the E-Machines splash screen displays (e.g. F1, F2, Del, F10 etc)
- Press Esc to see what's behind the screen.
- Remove the keyboard and power up, should produce a boot error and show a message

- Open it up and check the motherboard for BIOS chip markings and motherboard markings - post back with findings. We may be able to find a reset CMOS jumper.

- Remove the battery, wait a few minutes and power up (most basic way of re-setting CMOS).


Bottom line, you need to get into BIOS setup to change boot sequence!

[riv.j]

LostElf

In my first post I forgot to mention another important startup file that should be in the root directory of your hard disk, namely MSDOS.SYS. This is also a text file that can be examined and edited in Notepad. One of the instruction lines that it normally contains is BootGUI=[0 or 1]. I seem to remember that if you set the value of the parameter to 0 then this will turn off the Windows boot or "splash" screen. I may be wrong about this (I can't test it on my XP system, because XP is not a DOS based OS), but it might be worth your trying it in the hope that it will turn off your Emachine logo (which I assume has been substituted for the normal Windows logo on your machine) on boot up.

I guess (correct me if I am wrong) that what you are trying to discover by examining the boot process in detail is the reason why your computer apparently refuses to recognize boot floppies. In fact, the detection of boot floppies is the responsibility of the BIOS and not of the operating system on your hard drive. This is only loaded into memory and takes control from the BIOS once the BIOS has decided that no other OS, such as DOS on a boot floppy, has precedence. And I am afraid that Emachines cannot be blamed either unless, for some obscure reason, they had/have a policy of setting up the BIOS on their computers to ignore boot floppies. So really it would be a waste of time looking in your Windows startup files for the solution to your boot floppy problem (if that is what you are doing). In fact, I can think of only two possible reasons why your computer might refuse to recognize boot floppies: 1) the floppy drive is itself not functioning, either because it is bust, the read head needs cleaning or maybe its cable has become loose or dislodged; and 2) your BIOS settings are not allowing boot floppies to be detected.

Assuming that the first possible explanation is incorrect (i.e., there is nothing mechanically wrong with your floppy drive), then you must take a look in your BIOS Setup (using one of the methods described by Smurphy), probably under a sub-heading called something like BIOS Features Setup, and make sure that the Boot Up Floppy Seek option is set to Enabled and that the Boot Sequence option gives precedence to the floppy drive - i.e., the option should read A,C rather than C,A or any combination of A, C and CDROM that gives precedence to C over A.

I hope that this will solve your problem with the boot floppies, because, if it doesn't, then I am afraid that I am totally stumped. Even if it doesn't, however, there may be ways around it to wipe your hard drive and install a new operating system. I assume from what you say (even though you talk about "upgrades") that you have the means to fully install either the Win98 or Win2000 operating systems. Because I have no experience of either OS, I do not know if, like Win95, installing them requires a Windows Startup boot floppy as well as the installation CD, or, like WinXP, installation is done from the CD alone. If the latter, then you can install the OS by going into the BIOS again and giving boot precedence to the CDROM drive. And even if not, you can probably find the tools to wipe clean and set up your hard drive (FORMAT and FDISK) in the MSDOS folder on the installation CD, and they can be run from there (there may be a help program on how to use MSDOS commands, called HELP.COM, in the same folder, if you need it). Obviously, however, if this didn't solve your boot floppy problem (and I don't actually see why it should), you would be stuck with a bare hard drive and no means to install an operating system.

Finally, one last possibility occurs to me. If you do have the means to install a new OS, and its installation doesn't require a Windows Startup floppy boot disk, then you could consider creating a new partition on your hard drive and installing the new OS there. Then you could dual boot until you get the new OS the way you want it, and then delete the old partition entirely or erase the old OS and use it as a data partition. Partition Magic would do the job excellently, but I have heard that the free Ranish Partition Manager (available on the Web) is also very good.


RIV.J


P.s. There was no need for the self-flagellation (whether genuine or sarcastic - I am not sure which) regarding the Maxblast thing. I was just trying to cover all possibilities in trying to get to the cause of your problems, and I had (and still have) very little idea of your level of computer knowledge and expertise. Moreover, I know that Emachines don't always have Maxtor hard disks, because a friend had one with a Seagate drive. No insult to your intelligence was intended by my query.

[riv.j]

ZipUlrich


Thanks for the welcome and comment. Beware, however, that I may soon be plaguing you with my own growing list of XP problems. On a scale of one to ten I would rate my computer expertise at about five or six. I hope that you guys (or somebody out there) can well exceed that.


RIV.J