Hi! I need some help with a computer that belongs to a friend of mine, (its old but it works). whenever it starts up, you see the blue Hewlett Packard screen, then you see the windows 98 splash screen, then it drops to MSCDEX version 2.25, its MS-DOS?, then you type win, it asks if you want to switch to normal mode, type Y for yes, then it does it all over again. I was able to get it into safe mode, and I was looking around, and I found the autoexec.bat stuff in msconfig, and I honestly do not know a lot about DOS and its commands. I have the info from the file if anyone may know if there is anything wrong. [/] represents the checkbox with a check mark in them in the autoexec.bat autoexec.bat [/] @ECHO OFF [/] @echo off REM To make a DOS Boot Diskette, see the file C:\DosBoot\DosBoot.txt. [/] set path=c:\windows\command [/] LH c:\windows\command\mscdex /D:IDECD000 /L:M [/] SET PROMPT=$p$g [/] SET TEMP=C:\windows\TEMP [/] SET TMP=C:\windows\TEMP [/] call c:\dosboot\drivers.bat [/] c:\windows\smartdrv /q [/] c: [/] cd \windows REM to enable ZIP support in DOS: REM 1) cd C:\IOMEGA REM 2) run IOMEGA.exe REM 3) then uncomment the following line REM C:\IOMEGA\GUEST.exe REM for DOS Networking including most networked games, REM read the file IPX.BAT and then uncomment the following REM CALL C:\DOSBOOT\IPX.BAT REM REM The following lines have been created by Windows. Do not modify them. REM [/] C: [/] CD C:\WINDOWS [/] CALL C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM [/] C:\WINDOWS\WIN.COM /WX End of file Well, there it is. Im not sure, but I think LH c:\windows\command\mscdex /D:IDECD000 /L:M may be my problem. as there is no disc in the cd drive. If anyone can help me, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks again for any help. Here are the system specs. Hp pavilion 6643 support ID: 03-9944-0000-0100-2567 HW BOM: 101 SW BOM: 51 system number: D9944A serial number: US01002567 sticker on bottom of tower 5064-0343 S/N#:9362EC1TAA6M306851 System: Microsoft windows 98 Second edition 4.10.2222 A hewlett-packard pavilion genuine Intel Intel Celeron Processor 319.0MB RAM How soon we forget history...Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. George Washington

Check my #4 here: http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... Some dos application temporarily modified your config.sys and autoexec.bat files. When the application exited it should have replaced those files with the originals but for some reason that didn't happen. Sometimes the .wos files aren't there, meaning the original config.sys and autoexec.bat are gone. In that case edit out the lines or just delete config.sys and auteoxec.bat altogether since they're not needed for normal windows operation.

Can that be done in safe mode? I'm not so good with the DOS commands. How soon we forget history...Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. George Washington

Yeah, you can do it from safe mode. Using MSCONFIG, check 'selective startup' and then uncheck 'process config.sys file' and uncheck 'process autoexec.bat file'. OR, click on the config.sys and autoexec.bat tabs and uncheck the dos=single line in config.sys and the C:\WINDOWS\WIN.COM /WX line in autoexec.bat. If you edit it using the tabs, uncheck the mscdex line in autoexec.bat too. That activates the cdrom in dos and sometimes conflicts with the windows cdrom drivers. (edit) Tell you what, just uncheck the files and don't bother editing them. It looks like autoexec.bat is set up to create a bootdisk and you don't want that popping up every time you start windows. Nothing else is loading in autoexec.bat that's needed for windows so you really don't need it.

Win98 doesn't need the autoexec.bat or config.sys files. Boot into safe mode & try renaming them autoexec.old & config.old. Look for other entries such as autoexec.bak, autoexec.000, config.bak, config.000, etc & delete them all. Leave them in the recycle bin for the time being. Reboot & see what happens.