Win 98 no start

[Twigs]

Running Win 98se on a IBM Aptiva,
I get to the Win 98 splash screen. It stays there for about 1-2 mins. Then I get one beep and a message saying that one or more of your disk drives may have developed bad sector. Then it trys to start Scandisk but and error comes up saying Scandisk.exe could not be found you may have disk problems that need repairing. Press any key to start Windows. When you press a key the next message say Windows has stopped. press ctrl+delete to restart. When you do this you get back to the Win 98 splash screen and the same cycle repeats as above mentioned.
Also got and error one time saying that Windows detected a registry/configuration error.
Any ideas out there ??

[geoscomp]

Sounds like your hard drive is going bad..scandisk.exe may be on a bad sector..if you have a win98 boot disk, try to run scandisk from the floppy..if you have the cd for win98, you can put it in and try to run setup..it will run scandisk before setup.

[Orangeman]

I don't know if this will work because it does sound like your hard drive is going bad. However you could also run scandisk by pressing F8 when the system boots, holding it down until you get a menu with 5 options. select Command Prompt Only, then when you get to the C prompt write
scandisk, or scandisk.exe and enter.

Also, have you tried to run a bootscan virus check?

Good Luck,
Orangeman

[Ruslan]

Reformating the drive may be needed - it could be really bad sectors... Backup all the data first, then do LLF using test utility from HDD manufacturer - what exactly the drive, by the way?
Is it can't fix those bad sectors, read my posts here:
http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin...threadid=44644

[Twigs]

Originally posted by geoscomp
Sounds like your hard drive is going bad..scandisk.exe may be on a bad sector..if you have a win98 boot disk, try to run scandisk from the floppy..if you have the cd for win98, you can put it in and try to run setup..it will run scandisk before setup.

I tried running F-Prot virus software and got a message that it could not find C. I will try to running scandisk from 98 boot up disk.
Thanks for your help !!

[Twigs]

Well try to run scandisk from Win 98 CD. It went through half of the process with many IE5 files needing to be fixed. Then it stopped and said that there was HD errors that need to be fixed for setup to continue. Then it said need to check setup.txt. Which of course I could not get to. While running the scandisk process it did say that sectors were bad and can be fix later. But never got to that piont were they were fixed.
Any ideas what I should do next. Really looks like a virus hit the computer. I tried to boot with a virus boot disk but got and message saying can't find C drive. Should I replace the HD or can this be fixed ??

[shamus]

If it has bad sectors I'd replace it.You may be able to fix it with a LLF as Ruslan suggested, but I've never really had much success with drives that have that problem. If anything your just prolonging the inevitable.
My $.02.

having said that....Boot to dos and at the prompt type -

scandisk /surface /autofix /nosave /nosummary

[Twigs]

Originally posted by Ruslan
Reformating the drive may be needed - it could be really bad sectors... Backup all the data first, then do LLF using test utility from HDD manufacturer - what exactly the drive, by the way?
Is it can't fix those bad sectors, read my posts here:
http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin...threadid=44644

Still kind of new to this stuff.
What's LLF mean ??
Thank's for all your help !!

[edball]

It means Low Level Format. I think you probably need a new drive though.

[Twigs]

Originally posted by shamus
If it has bad sectors I'd replace it.You may be able to fix it with a LLF as Ruslan suggested, but I've never really had much success with drives that have that problem. If anything your just prolonging the inevitable.
My $.02.

having said that....Boot to dos and at the prompt type -

scandisk /surface /autofix /nosave /nosummary

To boot to DOS do I press F?

[edball]

Originally posted by Orangeman
I don't know if this will work because it does sound like your hard drive is going bad. However you could also run scandisk by pressing F8 when the system boots, holding it down until you get a menu with 5 options. select Command Prompt Only, then when you get to the C prompt write
scandisk, or scandisk.exe and enter.

Also, have you tried to run a bootscan virus check?

Good Luck,
Orangeman

This is how you boot to DOS.

[Twigs]

Originally posted by edball

This is how you boot to DOS.

When I press F8 I get IBM SurePath Setup Utility that say key board error.

[Ruslan]

Originally posted by Twigs
When I press F8 I get IBM SurePath Setup Utility that say key board error.

You can create a bootable floppy ( http://www.bootdisk.com ) and run utilty from it.
You didn't say, what exactly the drive's model, though...

[kennel]

If you can get a hold of a copy of spinrite try that. It has helped me many times, but still would look at replacing hd. Spinrite should get it so you could get data off if need be.

[supatech]

llf is a low level format, I would suggest not wasting your time doing that.

if you do have bad sectors (sounds like you do) this will more than likely continue to get worse, and having scandisk repair it will only be a temp solution

Just replace your drive they are cheap