windows 98, the computer froze now it will only boot up in safe mode or safe mode with network support, when I boot up in "normal" I get a steady red light on the hard drive light....I'm running a thorough scan disk now....any other reccomendations?

Open msdos.sys file and see if there is a line "BootSafe=1". If there is remove it completely. Do not change anything else in this file. Not only is this file hidden, but it's read only, so before you can make any changes you need to right-click the file and choose Properties, then uncheck the "Read only" box.

Boot up in safe mode, start msconfig and unselect everything in the 'Startup' tab to see if that helps.

thanks for the help, neither worked....I tried using a windows 98 startup floppy disk and after it came to the command prompt, I typed "win" and it started to load then I got a blue screen saying there was an error trying to load "vfat"....but normally when I boot in normal mode, it gets to a certain point and the hard drive just stops spinning......there was nothing new installed, it started happening after the computer crashed once......so I have a fully functional safe mode but for the life of me, I can't get the damn thing booted up regularly....help please... Andy

I think the error when trying to open Windows with the Startup Disk is normal. Maybe you should replace the current registry with a previous one. Start with Dos Prompt Only, type scanreg /restore and hit Enter. Pick a date from right before the problem started. OR Maybe ifshlp.sys got corrupted somehow... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q139063