PC not booting up

[Kathryn1974]

I have a PC which will not boot up. It just sticks on the Windows 98 screen.

I have ran scan disk and defrag from safe mode, but no errors found.

If I put the hard drive in another working PC it boots up with no problems.

 

[antew]

Kathryn, one of your peripherials in your PC may be damaged. Try to take out each one of them one at a time and try to boot. It could be sound card, Modem, Network Interface card or anything. If the PC works without that card the problem is on the card.

 

[wolluf]

'If I put the hard drive in another working PC it boots up with no problems' - that's very strange - normally win98 would need to reload all its hardware drivers for the new machine (unless the 2 machine's are identical) - and this often causes a problem. Certainly wouldn't normally just boot with no problem.

Does the drive really belong to the first PC?
Have you tried step-by-step boot mode (from same menu as safe mode)? May give you a clue as to which driver is causing it to stick.

 

[MikeAuds]

Try restoring the registry back before the problem occurred if the date is still available.. you'll have to boot from a '98 start-up to do that

 

[wolluf]

Also, some history to the problem would be useful (eg, when it started, what changes to hardware/software have been made, any major crashes, viruses etc).

 

[mscallisto]

Have you reset your BIOS back to system defaults?

 

[Kathryn1974]

I have the problem with a few of the same PC's. All the specs. are the same. They are all compaq deskpro en's PIII 500's. They were all working fine, but I ghosted them from an image we store on out network. The majority of them worked ok, but few are having the same problem. I have tried re-ghosting them from hard drive to hard drives with ones I kne worked, but still having the same issue.

I am unable to physically remove the peripherials as they are all built in on the motherboard.

I have tried restoring the registry.

 

[franklin97355]

Try pressing escape while the computer starts with the win logo (this should drop the logo so you can see the boot messages.) This may give you a clue. If not go into safe mode and check device manager. You may want to remove the entries and see what happens. Sometimes the network connection will cause this freeze as the computer tries to negotiate a connection.