One of our employees commented that her personal laptop had stopped working. In the interests of trying to get more familiar again with Windows problems and fixes I said I would take a look at it, but I’ve run into a brick wall and could use some help.
I asked if she had installed or removed anything lately. After some prompting, she said that her boyfriend had run Norton Anti-Virus on the machine and removed “something”; after that, the laptop would only get as far as showing the wallpaper, and a brief flash of the task bar at the bottom of the screen, but wouldn’t do anything else. It sounded to me like Norton had removed some spy/malware that resulted in Win98 being mucked up, and yes, it turned out that she’d had Kazaa on the machine at one point but then had removed it a couple months back.
When I started up her laptop I got the same symptoms she did. Scandisk and scanreg initially found no errors. I thought I would re-install Win98 to try to get around the problem, and that’s when things got odder yet. I cannot get the laptop to start up from a Win98 boot floppy (and yes, this disk has worked on other machines), nor will it start from the Win98 CD. In fact, it will not even read the Win98 CD (I get a reading drive failure error). However, it will boot from a Norton Anti-Virus boot CD, and run the anti-virus program on the CD.
I thought I would try renaming c:\windows into c:\winold, and then re-installing Win98 into c:\windows as if it were a brand-new installation. That doesn’t work either, because I’m back to the same problem of not being able to boot from the Win98 CD or floppy to even run setup. Moreover, I now get error messages that there is a problem with the registry. When I run scanreg I’m told that there are problems but scanreg can’t fix them - I should delete some files and try again, but there’s 8 GB free space left on the drive(!).
Is there anything else I can try, short of reformatting the hard drive? I get the impression she doesn’t have any hugely valuable files here but nothing is backed up, and I would hate to have to tell her to redo everything on her own from scratch. If a reformat is unavoidable, is there a simple way I can copy the contents of her drive (using DOS) to another machine first?
First thing, you might want to verify that the device bootup order in your CMOS settings will allow the floppy drive to be read before the CD-ROM and hard drives. If the floppy drive is unable to be read first, you may not be able to read from the CD-ROM due to MSCDEX not being loaded at boot.
Have you run an actual surface scan on the hard drive? It’s a long shot, but there might actually be a damaged sector in a key place on the driving. It would be a coincidence if this happened around the same time that the boyfriend deleted the file, but it could happen.
If the boot order stuff is correct, get a Win98 boot disk with MSCDEX support. Insert the CD and then run the setup program. Worth a shot. What about safe-mode, can you access safe-mode?
Also, it’s been awhile since I’ve used Win9x. But can you use ‘F8’ and boot to the command prompt with network support? If you’re on a LAN (or direct connect with cross-over cable) with another PC, you can use the command “NET USE x: \computer_name\share_name” to offload those files you wish to keep. (x: is the drive letter). Good luck.
Boot to a command prompt or in safe mode and check if there’s a folder named \windows\options\cabs - if there is, it means that whoever originally installed the OS copied the installation files there first - you should be able to run setup from that folder.
Okay, one major nuisance is that on this laptop, the floppy drive and the CD drive can’t run at the same time - there’s only one bay, so I have to pick one or the other.
The CMOS was set to boot from the CD drive first, but clearly something isn’t working right since that’s not what happens. If I set the CMOS to boot from a floppy drive first, it does read the floppy disk correctly (and this boot disk does have MSCDEX support on it). However, if I try to continue startup with CD-ROM support, the laptop determines that no CD drive is present and aborts installation of the CD driver. Going through startup with no CD-ROM support gets me exactly nowhere, since it never even attempts to load the appropriate driver even if I do swap drives after startup.
Tried to sneak Win setup in through the back door by booting from the Norton CD, aborting the virus scan to get to A:, and then putting in the Win98 CD. When I do this and type dir:A, though, I get a partial list of files with the rest of the file names (but not date and size!) reduced to gibberish. That unfortunately includes setup.exe.
Guy Incognito, I did try a surface scan, but it found nothing wrong. One encouraging bit in this mess, I guess.
ParentalAdvisory, safe mode is not working either. F8 doesn’t seem to work as an option for booting to a command prompt with network support. Hitting shift + F8 lets me go step-by-step through startup confirmation, which produced the following error messages:
Registry file was not found. Registry services may be inoperative for this session.
XMS cache problem. Registry services may be inoperative for this session.
The windows registry or system.ini file refers to this device file, but the device file no longer exists (comes up re: msmouse.vxd, ~\system\VMM32\IFSMGR.VXD, and ~\system\VMM32\IOS.VXD)
Insufficient memory to initialize Windows, quit one or more of your resident files in autoexec.bat and restart (at which point the machine shuts down on its own).
Mangetout, sadly enough no one copied the installation files onto the hard drive first, so I’m still stuck.
you need to get a windows me boot disk, or a 98se boot disk that has a generic cd driver that works with almost every cd player.
ANother option would be to install ME. If I remember correctly the win98 cd’s were not bootable to begin with. The ME cd’s however are.
you can even boot with a winme cd, then replace it and install win98.
The Win98se boot disk is a problem because the driver won’t load once it doesn’t detect the CD drive (remember, I have only the floppy drive or the CD drive available at any one time). I just tried booting with a WinMe recovery disk, and while it lets me boot to CD support only, I can’t swap the WinMe CD with the Win98 CD - the laptop stops reading the CD drive again. I would rather not install WinMe on this machine if I can help it, because then I’ll have the extra headache of getting it off again.
Would it be possible for me to copy the contents of my Win98 boot floppy to the hard drive, then reboot from those files so as to run Win98 setup from the CD?
The Win98se boot disk is a problem because the driver won’t load once it doesn’t detect the CD drive (remember, I have only the floppy drive or the CD drive available at any one time). I just tried booting with a WinMe recovery disk, and while it lets me boot to CD support only, I can’t swap the WinMe CD with the Win98 CD - the laptop stops reading the CD drive again. I would rather not install WinMe on this machine if I can help it, because then I’ll have the extra headache of getting it off again.
Would it be possible for me to copy the contents of my Win98 boot floppy to the hard drive, then reboot from those files so as to run Win98 setup from the CD?
Is this a corrupt msdos.sys file? See this (describes the same error) and then see this for how it should appear (it might just be a little bit of corruption).
Otherwise, best bet is to set up a multiboot using the files from your floppy and just editing the paths.
dylan_73, I did come across that particular article in the knowledge base, but wasn’t sure it really applied since I didn’t also get the VFAT initialization error. In fishing for other possibilities, I poked around inside the autoexec.bat and config.sys files that were on the hard drive, I found nothing but [REM] statements. Kind of peculiar, no? I found uninstall logs for Gator dating to around the time her laptop crashed - is this one of those nasty things that removal can leave you with?
At any rate, in the end I did copy all the files from my Win98 boot floppy onto the hard drive, and set the boot disk order to floppy -> hard drive -> CD drive. With the CD drive in, the machine skipped the missing floppy drive to boot from the files I’d copied onto the hard drive, and I was finally able to run Win98 setup from the CD drive and re-install Windows. The only legacy is that now the machine gives the options to run Win98 setup/ boot with CD support/ boot without CD support every time it starts up, but at least this way there won’t ever be a problem running setup again.
I just thought it might be a corrupt msdos.sys, but since it’s working now, all well and good. Autoexec.bat and config.sys should be blank on a win98 machine since all the stuff gets loaded in the windows portion: they’re just there for legacy support.
Booting to DOS mode and putting in a blank autoexec.bat and config.sys should fix the options at startup thing…move the originals to a new filename rather than deleting them…just in case…I don’t think the option has anything to do with the bootloader, but you could do fdisk /mbr if it is.
