Safe mode in Windows 98

Video. Lower the resolution. Conflicts in harware. What is the problem with the system. You can't boot? Errors on startup? we need a little more info

Many times the solutions can be found in the device manger. (right click on my computer select properties, Select device manager tab)
There are 2 things that I look for -
1. Driver problems such as a video driver that is not the right driver forthe video card.
2. Resource conflicts can be found by double clicking on the little computer at the top. While only 1 isa device can use each irq, 3 pci devices can share the same irq (usually). Some devices don't share with others. Some devices are not able to accept any available irq.
If you have many devices in the machine this can get interesting.
Keep in mind that in safe mode old devices will show up unless you delete them.
It is a good idea to delete the old devices that areno longer used or duplicate entries. The problem with dupes is that you don't know which is the old and which is the current.
The best way to remove them if you have the proper driver is to just delete all and reinstall the proper driver.
I bet the device driver fpage holds the answer to 90% of safe mode causes but it takes experience and understanding your computer, its device drivers and how irqs and memory is assigned in computers. There are books and chapters of books that help learn IRQ / IO assignments.

If you press F8 when the system says starting windows 98, you can select option 2 (logged). This will create a file (bootlog.txt) in the root directory of the bootable drive (probably C). Open that file (by booting into safemode or from a floppy disk) and look at that file. What you will be looking for is a "LoadFail" line. This will tell you what driver (or device) is causing you system not to boot normally.

another thing to do is examine the history of the machine. -ie- what has changed since it last booted properly.
Most often, something has been installed recently which is causing the problem.
Also, if there is an error when trying to boot normally, that will usually point you in the right direction.

The first question to answer is what happened between the last 2 boots of the PC?

New software?
New hardware?
Driver Update?
Windows update?
File deleted?

Then, you can start to devise a plan of action.

I agree with setting the video resolution to minimum (16 color, 640*480 is the W98 safe mode default)

Then check device manager for hardware conflicts.

The mext step to take would be to run msconfig, and enable either selective, or step by step startup to see what software or driver is causing the system to error.

Cleaning up the temporary files, and defragging the swap file can also make a big difference.

Don't forget to watch out for known system configuration bugs such as the 32 and 64GB hard drive issues along with the greater than 511MB issue with windows 9X.
(Even a change in a virtual device driver can trigger the 511MB RAM bug)

Beyond the above, you need to look for hardware problems such as bad ram or an overheated CPU.

Chas

Thanks for helpful information. The problem was found in the video where a background (wallpaper) was causing the problem. Changed background to standard (none) and rebooted system. No problems thereafter.