Question about the system rebooting

This might seem like a simple fix but you mentioned Symantec, does that mean you have Norton Antivirus installed. I have had numerous problems similar to yours with win98 and Nortons. Try uninstalling the Nortons and use another anitvirus, worked for me. Another idea is to do a clean install of windows but this time remove all components except for video card, floppy and cdrom. See how that works then add each component, try the system and then add next component until you find problem. Shutdown problems could be due to faulty video card so try another one. Could also be faulty ram. Hope this helps

A lot of these problems are caused because you are using win98. A clean format /install does fix it for a time. Short of that, try doing some drive maintainence. Run the scandisk with full drive checking, then erase off all *.tmp files, clear yourwindows\temp directory and c:\temp directory, purge the recycle bin, Personally I only use nortons when there is a problem and the reason for that is it greatly impedes the performance of your system. Try ad-aware to remove spyware from the inteernet from your pc.
When all done with that run a nortons windoctor to clean up your system and then defrag your drives. If you still see no improvement then a new install of win98 seems to be the only option left. Make your backups and have at.
Goodluck!

Another thing you might look at is the number of applications that are being loaded at startup. How many programs are on the start bar? NAV? Norton Task Scheduler? Volume Control? Clock? These all take time to load and slow the process. I can vouchfor problems with Norton slowing the boot process. The reboot? Windows thinks that it had an error and reboots itself to correct it. One of your software packages may have a fault. Some people think 3 to 4 hours without a reboot is good for a Microsoft product! You will have to disable Norton to run scandisk or defrag the drive unless you use Norton Utilities/Disk Doctor. Disable the Symantec products and/or upgrade to W2K or XP.

I assume when you say "that is I hear the beep after much time", that is a BIOS configuration issue. You should look for problems such as a failure to detect a second IDE device, or possible two devices attached on the same IDE channel, but both set to slave, master, or one drive being set to master with a slave, but no slave is present. If you installed the burner yourself, it is entirely possible that the burner and the writer are both set to master on the secondary IDE channel. That causes the IDE detection to take several minutes to resolve the drives, in the end one of them failing. Look for errors in your BIOS, that is the key to this problem. I would suggest going into the BIOS and doing a hard drive (IDE) detect. Look to see if any devices that are on your system are not detected, or detected incorrectly. This will be your culprit.

Did not mention if you did a "clean" reinstall, format the HD then reload the system. This gets rid of all unwanted files, found in one system that after IE was loaded the program was creating ~tmp.* and FFF*.* in the windows directory, killing the boot process. If you made a backup boot disk, boot off it and type: sys/? to get directions on copying the system from a: to C:. (sorry have not worked with WIN 98 in a while)

But with your main problem does sound like a conflict in the bios with identification of attached components, try booting with everything (CDROM and scanner) unplugged, do it at least twice. If you see a noticeable improvement one or both are conflicting the other components.

Trying full scandisk and defrag may help, looking for *.tmp, ~*.*, temp*.*, and *.bak, delete all massive numbers of these in single directories may help. Too many in one directory will bog down system and does not like deleting more than 1000 at a time.

I know I just summerized mostof the above but they have worked for me in the past

Direct CD from Adaptec can cause problems like this.

This may be caused by a failing hard drive. How does the drive sound. Is there any clicking or clunking sounds. Does it spin up right away.

A system I'm working on right now keeps rebooting.I disconnected the hard drive and tried another and it never stops at all. It has a Maxtor drive in it. I downloaded maxblast utility and ran the diagnostics on the drive and sure enough it has problems with the boot sector. There was an error code that advised getting in touch with Maxtor to have the drive replaced.

One thing I have found to be a problem for a reboot without your direct command is a bad modem. Try removing the modem card and using a pencil eraser clean the contact points and reinsert or change pci slots. Any card that does not make good contact can cause a reboot....

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