A friend has this situation & wanted me to ask this…
" I have a partition in my harddrive with it running XP on one side and 98 on the other. When I go into XP, it starts up fine, but when it goes into the desktop the screen goes black. When I go into 98, it starts up just fine. This is weird."
Apparently, she’d been doing this fine for some time & the problem just started this week. So what should she do?
Sounds like the video driver installation got corrupted somehow. She’ll have to boot into XP in safe mode (hold down the F8 key when booting), then reinstall the video driver. The easiest way is to copy the required video driver installation files to the hard drive while in 98, then reboot via safe mode into XP, and either run the video driver installer or go into Device Manager and manually update the video driver.
Thanks! Any more details on this? Does anyone else have any other ideas or does this sound like the answer.
Sounds spot on to me. If you’re seeing stuff on the screen during boot, but not at the desktop, it’s most likely a driver issue, or that the display resolution is set to something the monitor can’t handle, or something like that. Booting into Safe Mode should permit the opportunity to correct it.
The only other thing I can think to add is that sometimes safe mode doesn’t even work on XP (something I never encountered in 98), and you have to do a repair install. To do that, you put your XP disk in the machine and restart the computer. When the option appears, do not choose the “Recovery Console”, but wait for the option that mentions repair. Just a little over an hour later, you’ll have your computer back, with all the drivers reset but all your programs intact.
There’s also the possibility that she just installed Windows Genuine advantage, and it didn’t detect the computer as genuine. That normally manifests itself with a message telling you that it has happened, though. And you can get around it by going into “Safe Mode with Command Prompt,” which will be an option on the menu you get when you press F8 a bunch of times as mentioned above. (Of course, you won’t have any Internet in that mode…)
Just out of curiosity, why one earth does your friend still use Windows 98?
I would also add that it’s very unlikely that her problem has anything to do with the fact that she has a dual-boot with 98. So she shouldn’t let that confuse her thinking when dealing with this issue.
I don’t know about the friend, but I keep it around because it boots up in less than 15 seconds on modern computers. If I’m in a hurry, and the computer’s been off, it’s often faster to load 98.
(At least, it is in theory. In practice, I’m never in that big a hurry.)
there are modern computers that can run 98? Seriously? few consumer hardware manufacturers write drivers for it, and there are many situations where it won’t even boot on newer systems. For example, 98 will fail to boot on any Pentium 4 faster than 2.1 or 2.2 GHz due to a timing error in a subsystem.
and anyway, why are you shutting down your system(s) in the first place? wake from S3 sleep on Windows 7 is far faster than 15 seconds.