I have a Compaq Presario 5050 with win98. It won't boot anymore. It gets to the microsoft windows 98 flag screen with the moving bar at the bottom of the screen and that's it. Strangely, the bar keeps moving. I've never seen a hang where it doesn't eventually stop. Anyway, I'm guessing that I can boot into safe mode to try figuring it out, but I can't figure out how to do that. I thought you pressed f8 before it gets done with the self-test, but that doesn't help. I can't even figure out how to get the BIOS setup screen, for that matter. Compaq didn't document these things in the manuals that came with the computer...

TRY HOLDING DOWN CTRL KEY! that should do it!

F8 should get you into the Safe Mode, try pressing it multiple times all through the the POST up until the computer starts Windows. SOME computers show a message at the bottom of the screen while the POST is being performed which usally states "To Enter (BIOS) Setup Press" (Usually one of the F keys or the DEL key). If its not there you may have to go to the Compaq web site to look it up. Do you have an Emergency Boot disk to try?

If the above doesn't work, try holding (or repeatedly pressing) the Shift key for Safe Mode. Try the same with F2 for BIOS setup. Good luck!

I dont know about your computer but i do know these cpus that i work with up here and the one i own at home the hot key to do it with is f2 which you hit right before you goto the win screen

You have 8 seconds to press f8 after you get the message "windows is starting" Brad...........

Hi Lawrence, I have a Compaq Deskpro EP/EB. For accessing to BIOS options press F10 before the Win98 splashing screen. As far as Safe mode is concerned I have couple of suggestions for you. 1. Brad is right. When you re-boot your system just start tapping the F8 key you will get the menu. 2. If some-how F8 key don't solve your problem then apply a long approach to get to the Safe mode: You need to edit the MSDOS.SYS file. In WIN95/98 it's a text file for about 1 KB. This file has three attributes flagged to it i.e. Read only, Hidden and System. You must remove these attributes first before you will be allowed to make changes. You can use the DOS ATTRIB command to do that. Now the big question is, how to access this file?. You can boot from a Win 98 start-up (EBD) disk or any DOS boot-able disk and edit this file through edit command or make a copy of this file into a floppy disk and edit with any text editor e.g NotePad from other computer and copy back to it's original location. This file should be in the root directory/folder. In the [Options] section which specifies what feature of the boot process will be turned off or left active; try the following: BootFailSafe= The setting of this to 1 will cause Windows to start in Safe Mode. 0 is the default (if present). BootMenu= When set to 1 will cause the display of the boot menu, at every boot up, without having to press F8. Of course you have to change back into it's original shape, when are done (unless you want to see the menu for every boot-up). Good luck.