OK ...Now I can't get the PC to boot at all. It goes to start up and appears to just go to sleep, the monitor also goes to sleep. Now what. I just went to bootdisk.com to try and DL an new win98 bootdisk , going to try that now. Thanks Take Care Dee

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You may have a hardware problem. Very difficult to say what. Windows may be so corrupted that it wont run. You hard drive may be knackered. We need to try a few things and try and narrow it down. How far does it get in its startup ? That may give a clue. If the computer boots from floppy but then goes to sleep when you try and boot from the hard drive, that could indicate a hard drive problem, or less likely an IDE channel problem, or perhaps a power supply problem (not enough power to run everything). What is the last message you get when you try and startup and is this always the last message you get. If it stops at the same place each time then you can deduce that the next step or the last step(if uncompleted), is the problem step. Possible it goes to sleep when it tries to read from the hard drive. If it stops in different places each time then you can deduce that the failure is not caused by part of the startup process itself, but by something failing during the startup process. When it goes to sleep.. is the power still on? is the hard drive light on? do you mean by sleep that it lock up and doesn't repond and the mouse cursor doesn't move, or that the screen goes blank ? I dont think we can safely say that you have a hard drive problem just yet. Something else could be causing you pc to stop. If the pc stops during writes to the hard drive, this will likely cause problems like 'both copies of the fat are not the same', cross linked problems etc, that scandisk can fix. Normally however, a single run of scandisk would fix these errors, however if critical windows system file were corrupted then windows might not run. When your pc goes to sleep, does it still have power ? Does the monitor have power ? Does the monitor get its power from the pc or is it plegged into a seperate power socket? Or when you say goes to sleep you mean it has power but is blank ? A power supply problem could cause the problems you are experiencing. This could be either that you have too much hardware attached and dont have the power to run it, or the power supply is faulty. The first thing I would do is boot from floppy and see if the pc locks up. Then I would try and run scandisk one last time from floppy. That's probably enough for now. You could buy a new drive and run the old one as slave and try and recover files. This will only work if the hard drive is the problem.

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I shut it down completely and waited and powered up. It boots to the Dell password again now. Onece you enter the password it goes to the Windows Splash Screen, the bottom graphic moves for a couple of seconds then halts and you hear the PC shut down. I can't boot from the floppy, it gives the non system disk or disk error replace and strike any key. I would like to try reinstalling windows over the existing copy. I did that once withmy Compaq and it worked an d I didn't lose any files. But I can't get it to recoginize the CD dirve. I choose with Cd support and I type in setup at the C;/ prompt and it won't do anything. Then I try to change the prompt to D; for the Cd drive and it says( I think) invalid drive parameter missing ...I have to go check it says sometihng like that but it won't switch the dirve. IS there prompts you can give me to try to get the win 98 reinstalled without reformating or changing the harddrive? IF I can do a Dell restore i would do that too. But cant get the drive that Cd drive to work. Any suggestions? Thanks Take Care

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If the pc wont boot off the floppy it is probably one of two things, You are not using a boot disk, or the disk is faulty. You are not booting from the 'A' drive. Check in the bios that you are booting from the 'A' drive first. You start to confuse me from here. You say you cant boot from a floppy but then say that you 'choose cd support'. This sounds like a boot option when booting from floppy. What are you doing that brings up that option? If you boot from floppy a ram drive is created that will normally be assigned the letter after the last hard drive. On a single partition system this would be the 'D' drive. The cd drive is then assigned the next letter, in this case the 'E' drive. Perhaps you are not looking in the right place for the cd drive. Check the 'E' drive. To reinstall windows I would boot from a floppy, choose cd support, go to my cd drive, find setup.exe on the cd, then run setup.exe. Provided your bios is setup to boot from floppy first, and you have a boot disk that has the correct drivers for your cd (most cd's will work with the drivers already supplied on a standard boot floppy.), you should have no problem running setup.exe. I have no experience with recovery disks. Possibly yours has been created as a boot disk. Then, provided your pc is capable of booting from cd, you could set your bios to boot from cd drive first and boot off the cd rom. Then do whatever it is that you need to to do a recovery. To change to the 'D' drive under dos, type 'D:' not 'D;'. Get the correct error message and do a google search on it. I dont get anything like your error message when I type in an incorrect drive letter under dos.

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I've had similar problems on two computers. From what you say I would guess your FATs have become corrupted. Try the following: 1) Place the drive as a slave in another computer. Go to Windows Explorer and see if you can find it As D:\; E:\, etc. If you can see it, you can copy all important foldres/docs onto the other hard drive. If you can't see it, or information is corrupted (file names are numbers, etc) then you need to go to 2)or jump to 3)below. 2) Download a programme called GetDataBack. You can get the free demo version. Save it on the good hard drive. Once installed and run you should be able to detect your bad hard drive. Select it and run the utility. It will find the files on your bad drive. The demo version doesnot allow you to copy the whole content of the drive, but you can see what is there and evaluate whether you want to pay for the full version. 3) If you don't want to do step 2), then you would need to re-partition and reformat your hard drive, but YOU WILL LOOSE ALL YOU HAD ON IT. First make sure you have a good Windows 98 start up disk (if you don't, then create one on a friend's machine (go to Control Panel - Add/Remove - Start Disk. Boot your machine with the start up floppy disk in the drive, it should start booting. (if not you will have to enter the BIOS and set it to boot from A drive first). Once booting, you can choose "without CD Rom support" at this stage as its quicker. Once you get the A:\ prompt you should type Fdisk (ENTER). It will ask you if your drive is larger than 512 Mb. Type "Y". It may then tell you the drive has problems. Carry on selecting option 4 to see what partition information you have. Most likely it will tell you there is none. Escape and select option 1 - follow the instructions - I suggest you create just a single partition and the option 2 to create the DOS sector. Escape and it will tell you you will need to restart the computer. Once restarted (with floppy still in), when you get the A:\ prompt type Format C: You will be told you will loose all information. Type Y and it will then format your drive. When finished you should restart, this time selecting "With CD ROM support". Place the Windows CD in the drive. From the A:\ prompt you should be able to find your CD Rom drive (D:\ or E:\) type SETUP, and you should begin a new install of Windows on your hard drive.

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