Windows 98 not booting up.

[Sportin' 1a]

I have a (not this machine) machine running Win98. It stops during the boot process and all I see is a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the black screen. Not a prompt, a cursor. It starts to boot, recognizes the hard drive, keyboard, and mouse then stops. I can get to the bios by holding a key down. I used to be able to get the rescue disk to work but no longer. I started to do a scan disk off of it and since that it will no longer work. I have a CD drive. Somebody I talked with seems to think I can load soemthing up that way to allow me to at least save the info off my hard drive. I tried it with linux disk he gave me but it wasn't very helpful. Any thoughts? Thank you

 

[Dishdog]

If you use the 98 install disk there should eb an option to repair windows. this should at leat get you onto your desktop.

 

[Sportin' 1a]

Thanks.

I tried that and this is what hapened:

Starting Windows 98...

"The Compression driver cannot be set up correctly.
Get version from your vendor that is compatible with thsi version of windows."

When I press "any key to continue" I come to the setup screen. If
I continue to do the setup won't I loose all the files I'm trying to save?

 

[DJ Stephen]

No you shouldnt because it is only trying to do a repair. I have had this problem before.

 

[Tommy Boy]

take the hard drive out of the computer, switch the jumper to slave and install it in another computer, then save the files you want onto the other computer. and just wipe the drive and reinstall 98

 

[Dishdog]

Thanks.

I tried that and this is what hapened:

Starting Windows 98...

"The Compression driver cannot be set up correctly.
Get version from your vendor that is compatible with thsi version of windows."

When I press "any key to continue" I come to the setup screen. If
I continue to do the setup won't I loose all the files I'm trying to save?

No you won't loose any information becauae it's just making sure all the windows startup programs are there and if they aren't it loads them into place to allow you to boot. i have done this many times and never loss any information.