My aunt has this super old P2 rig, a HP Vectra VL (its her only PC though and she needs it fixed apparently) so I'm assigned to the task. Again. This time it won't boot to Win98. I turn it on, i get about 5 seconds of 98 loading logo, then it goes black and in white says "It is now safe to turn your computer off. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart." I popped in a old 98 disk to see if I could do a system repair rather than mucking with this piece, but theres no repair option that I can find. It could be the fact that its a clean install disk and not a repair disk, I don't have the original restore/install disk that came with the rig. I'm thinking I need to reset the BIOS, but I can't figure out how to open the damn desktop formfactor HP case. Its got a number of buttons and clips, but pressing them and fiddling with the casing doesn't work. Theres also no visible screws for the casing. Very odd. Anyone have any suggestions, or will I have to build her a new rig out of spare junk and give it to her?
If I remember correctly, there is no repair option in Windows 98, that option was introduced as of Windows 2000. What I do find strange is that you aren't getting the proper shut down message, which should be "It is now safe to turn off your computer" on both the original and SE edition of Windows 98, unless a custom shut down message was created or something out of the ordinary is affecting the system, such as a virus. First thing to try is booting into safe mode to see what's what. Hit F8 before the Windows logo and select Safe Mode. If that is fine, then something booting up with Windows is causing a problem, the only problem is finding the cause, which could be anything such as driver issues or a virus. One of the small advantages of Windows 98 is the ability to choose what boots up with Windows using the Step-by-step confirmation option. It will identify each item to you and you can decide whether it starts with Windows or not (At this point, I'd like to point out that I don't remember if it only applies to the config.sys and autoexec.bat files only but if I remember correctly, it also goes through win.ini and/or system.ini). This process will only work if you can get into safe mode because if safe mode is broken, I doubt you can get far through this step. What this process will allow you to do is find out what is causing your problem as the second you hit "y" to confirm the item to start, Windows will load this item immediately. If the above fails, you can only do a limited amount of repair on Windows 98 via command prompt if you cannot boot into Windows. To access command prompt, hit F8 before Windows logo and select Command Prompt Only). First, perform a registry repair using scanreg /restore which undos changes done since last Windows booted successfully after a registry change. Try booting into Windows by restarting your computer. If the registry restoration fails, run the Windows 98 setup (and disk should do) and choose to upgrade. This should allow you to get Windows working with most things kept intact from the previous installation (apart from some cosmetic changes but old software should function as normal). Unfortunately, I can't solve your case problem as HP released quite a huge variation in case designs for the Vectra range, the later models being much easier to open.
Stop! Hammertime. OK, I can't help you in any serious way, so I'll be going now... Sounds a bit like a virus, though. Is the "It is now safe to..." text orange on a black background?
why not take out the hard drive, pop it into your computer, copy over all of her 'important' stuffs, blank the drive and re-install windows 98se?!
I could but I highly doubt she has a single copy of the software thats already on it. Office 95, Outlook 97, all things I would even struggle to replace even with the blessing that is the internet. Safe mode doesn't work, it just plops me into a A:\ command line, and I had little idea on what to do from there. I tried the Command Prompt registry restore, no backups were found though. No registry errors were reported in the registry scan though. EDIT Fixed it by running MS scandisk, it found numerous errors that it fixed using MS magic. Now it runs fine. I played Tetris. Thanks for all the help, especially to tzang.
