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Windows 98 booting only into safe mode

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13 replies

by hoochdaddie 1 view

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My win 98 machine will not boot into normal mode. I can get it to a DOS prompt or safe mode, but when i try normal mode it stops with a blinking cursor in the top-left of the screen.

I have not loaded any programs, or installed any new hardware. Just turned on one day and started this.

From Safe Mode, i looked at the device manager and saw no problems. There was no error message in safe mode which gave away a possible problem.

The machine is about 2 years old a Pentium II...

13 replies

by volovoy

Try this. Turn on your computer, press and hold Control key ( or F8 key) until you see boot menu. Choose create bootlog file and continue booting process. When your computer stops, restart it into DOS or Safe mode and open file Bootlog.txt. Check this file to see which driver fail to load.

Good luck

by cd

Or,
You could reinstall WIN 98 over the previous existing installation. Reinstalling WIN won't loose any previous settings or personal files. You need a WIN98 boot floppy disk; you boot from floppy with CD-ROM option and then from WIN 98 CD you select setup.exe.

Good luck.

by jmstitt

Try booting the computer to safe mode. Enter the device manager and remove the IDE drive controllers. When you reboot, Windows will find the hardware and reinstall it. There are many things that cause boot failure. This may be the easiest place to start. HTH

by nicholasp

I had the exact same problem and the solution was very simple.Check your resolution.

Boot up in safe mode and change the resolution to 640-480 16 colors see if that works.

It sounds like something is wrong with the video driver.

by froutson

The solution I found to fix a similar problam was to go into the BIOS and make sure that PCI Bus Mastering was turned ON. I set this once and the hanging on windows boot stopped.

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