Gateways E-3400 Win 98, 128 MB RAM, 1 GB HD, Pentium II, Quantum 7GB HD, 3COM integrated nic, novell network. there are about 5 of these identical machines in a school lab that have been freshly reimaged during the summer. on all of them, when you boot up, they'll "almost" finish booting (you'll see a Windows splash screen, then it goes back to a black DOS screen), but there will be a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner of the monitor and it will sit there forever. usually it will boot fine if you reset/restart it after a blinking-cursor incident. in the bootlog.prv file of the unfinished booting version, the last line is: [0009D3C8] Init Success esdi_506.pdr in the bootlog.txt file of the finished booting version, the next line is: [0009D3CF] INITCOMPLETE = VMM (and then in continues on with a bunch of other stuff). i've see posts about the autoexec.bat files, hard drive UDMA settings being wrong, but nothing seems to help. any ideas?

This is usually because of an incorrect or duplicated hardware driver. Will the computer boot to safe mode?

yes. there WAS a duplicate CD rom driver that was visible from safe mode, but i deleted it. the file that it locks at (Init Success esdi_506.pdr) seems to be associated with the IDE controller or hard drive. i'm at a loss :(

What type of memory do you have in the PC? I'll buy it from you because you have a paperweight.

well, that would mean i have 5 paper weights...which i don't. the machines WILL boot fine AFTER you RESTART them when they freeze - which you might have noticed if you had read the post in its entirity.

If you can disable the 3com in setup, try that and see if it helps. If so you may need to reinstall or upgrade the drivers.