Speaking from personal experience of the past few days, I would look very carefully at your hard drive. I was experiencing the same sort of erratic bootup. Sometimes it would go fine, then again, it would stop after the selection menu (I use that displayed for easy access to the optional boots). Would press the reset and of course, would want to start in safe mode. I would force it to normal by selection and up it would come. Finally, the machine could not find one of the two drives and would boot fine. Debugged the system by substituting another drive that I knew was working. That was the problem. The one drive was quite dead. Bought a new one of the same size (the trial was a little one) and am back up. Course, lost LOTS of stuff, but the important things were saved with the exception of some pictures.
Now if anyone has any good tips for getting a drive that is hung to spin, so that I can one time recover, it would be much appreciated. I do have an external Kanguru drive that I have the dead drive in at the moment trying to get it to spin. Keith Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > P180 MHz, Award bios, Win 98 SE, 192 MB RAM > There are many stories of Windows shutdown problems, but no-one seems to > have the problem that I have -- i.e. Windows refuses to load after boot-up. > > Sometimes I have to reboot as many as half a dozen times before Windows will > load. It doesn't matter which option I choose - normal, safe mode, command > prompt only - after reading autoexec.bat and config.sys, the system just > hangs - no activity from the hard disk, just nothing. This has been going on > for a long time now, and my solution is to keep the machine turned on > permanently to save myself the hassle of spending sometimes more than half > an hour in futile attempts to get the machine working. That's OK most of the > time, but of course sometimes I need to restart Windows after installation > of new software, or indeed just to clear the memory, and then my troubles > start all over again. > > While I don't really expect to find a solution, I'd like to know what > causes this hang-up. Is it connected with the hard disk, motherboard, or > Windows itself - i.e. is it a hardware or software problem? Has anyone else > experienced this most annoying phenomenon? If so, did you find a solution? > Would reinstalling the OS help? (I doubt this, because the problem has been > there ever since I did the first install and after subsequent reinstallation > of Win 98) > > If anyone can shed light on the matter I'd appreciate it. Thanks. > > Virginia > > Virginia Da Costa - Thatched Cottage - Kent - UK > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ** [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Net-Tamer V 1.09.2 - Test Drive -- Keith Thompson, Worthington, OH (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Home Web Page: http://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~kthompson/ Genealogy Web Page: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~kthompson Age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill. ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
