Medalist 3210 in E Machine

[davisluck]

Hello, I have been working on a friends computer for about 2 months. Ran great, no problems. Then one day I turn on the computer, and you hear the typical hard drive noise for a few moments, the screen goes to the Windows 98 start up screen, and stops dead. Can anyone help me please. Thank you.

 

[PeterGriff]

First step is to try starting in Safe mode (press F8 repeatedly during the first startup screen (after the hard drive detection). If you can get the computer going in safe mode then you can try and work out by elimination what is causing the problem.
If not you should try to boot to the command prompt or from a boot floppy and run scandisk (be wary about making any major changes if it finds errors until you can get an idea of what is going on - let it do the surface scan first). This will tell you if there is hard drive errors developing that have caused the problem.
After that it would be a reinstall unless you have any other clues (mystery attachments that could have been a virus...?). Some virus's do horible deleting-type stuff which requires a reinstall anyway.
In any case - if you have any important data on this PC then try to mount the hard drive in another machine and save the data before making too many changes.

Peter G

 

[davisluck]

Thank you so much for your reply. I have been hunting for info for days, and you are the first one to help. I was able to get to safe mode and am running virus and other system info right now. Thanks you again so much.