Here is the system first off. It is an asus p4b266 mainboard with 256mb DDR memory. It is running a p4 1.7ghz CPU. Has a 64mb Video card and 60gb drive. DVD and CDRW also. Nothing fancy. The operating system on the machine is Windows 98se. I have reinstalled it and if I do not restart the machine and reinstalling it, Windows works great, it isn't until I restart it to where the problems happen. If you power the machine up, as it gets past the windows splash screen and ready to go into windows, it will either freeze or just restart itself. It sometimes will boot up fine and work without problems. More of the time though it is trying to boot into windows and locks up and restarts itself. I have updated the bios and checked settings to default but still no luck. Please, someone help me if they can.

Howdy Chris! Have you tried to boot into SafeMode? Please post back.

Have you installed all the Windows 98se Updates at the WINDOWS UPDATE SITE that are for harddrive issues?

Yes I have installed and downloaded all updates for the machine. Windows update doesn't have any more updates. I did try it in safe mode. Safe mode workes great with no problems. It is just with regular mode. Hope that helps, Chris

I've seen precisely the issue you've described--more than a few times. You failed to mention what chipset you're using. Windows 95, 98, and 98 Second Edition don't properly support certain chipsets from VIA Technologies. Contrary to the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles, this is not an issue with the chipsets--there's nothing wrong with them. (The same chipsets work flawlessly under Solaris, Linux, BeOS, and other non-Microsoft operating systems.) *If* you happen to be using a VIA chipset(they make excellent chipsets, by the way), you will need to download the latest 4-in-1 driver update for Windows from VIA. You can get it here: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2 The only way I was ever able to get Windows 95 and 98 working properly on systems with VIA chipsets was to install VIA's drivers.

The chipset is the intel i845 chipset. I have seen similar problems with the via ones and have had that 4 in 1 drive fix them many times. I just downloaded the intel drive so let me give it a shot. Thanks for the input guys, Chris