Why are some option on the Win98 msconfig utility greyed out

My brother has managed to kill his computer somehow. I’m trying to help him over the phone, and we got it booting in Safe Mode. Now, though, we gotta figure what the problem is. He can load up msconfig and we’re playing around with the startup options, but the options to load config.sys, autoexcec.bat, and winstart.ini are greyed out; he can’t check or uncheck them. He can check/uncheck the system.ini, win.ini and startup group options.

Any ideas? How do we get these ungreyed so we can narrow down our problem?

He needs to change the startup selection to ‘selective startup’ and reboot.

um, that’s what we’re doing. But 3 of the 6 options under selective startup remain greyed, even after reboot.

If you look at the menu tabs you’ll see that they correspond to the items in the ‘selective startup’ checklist, all tabs except for the one you must be looking at which is called ‘general’.

If you click on one of those tabs you’ll find a list of tickoff boxes.

If every item in the tick list is checked, then it will appear in the ‘general’ list as being selectable.

If just one item is not checked, then the whole of that check list will appear on the ‘general’ list as greyed.

Dunno if that helps at all.