okay, this one has me scratching my head. When i boot win98 (first edition) it gets about 3/4 of the way through the bootup process then throws a "windows protection error. you must restart your computer" at me. the only funky thing is, when i press restart and boot it while logging (option 2 on the boot menu) it boots. safe mode boots as well. any clues?
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Startup weirdness - crashes when not logged, boots when logged?
- Thread starter Siridar
- Start date
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New member
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
I had similar problems, various weird crashes on bootup, but always when I re-started it would load the second time. It only happened on a cold boot as well, a restart or ctrl-alt-dlt wouldn't exhibit the same symptoms.
1) First thing to try, on the second boot, don't select 'logged boot' just select a normal start. That will either eliminate or incriminate the logging as part of the problem/solution. (My guess is that it will make no difference).
2) Run MSCONFIG and enable the "DOS Startup menu". This way you will get the option to run a logged boot on the first boot (before the crash). (I think you can get the same result holding down the CTRL key during boot, but don't quote me on that). This should help you narrow down where the failure actually is.
3) If you have recently installed any hardware, try removing it and see if the problem goes away. In my case, I had installed a USB mouse and 64MB additional RAM. I of course suspected the USB (VIA chipset on the motherboard) because I had never enabled it before. Much to my surprise, I had a bad DIMM. It passed the motherboard's memory test (once I enabled it, just to check), but apparently Windows runs some sort of RAM test when booting. Apparently, it flags the bad RAM and on the second (warm) boot, just ignores it. There is a great freeware program at that I used to prove it was in fact a bad DIMM.
It's also possible (if it is bad RAM) to limit the amount of RAM windows accesses using MSCONFIG. If I limited my RAM usage to 64M I was able to boot without problem.
Hope this helps you somewhat
1) First thing to try, on the second boot, don't select 'logged boot' just select a normal start. That will either eliminate or incriminate the logging as part of the problem/solution. (My guess is that it will make no difference).
2) Run MSCONFIG and enable the "DOS Startup menu". This way you will get the option to run a logged boot on the first boot (before the crash). (I think you can get the same result holding down the CTRL key during boot, but don't quote me on that). This should help you narrow down where the failure actually is.
3) If you have recently installed any hardware, try removing it and see if the problem goes away. In my case, I had installed a USB mouse and 64MB additional RAM. I of course suspected the USB (VIA chipset on the motherboard) because I had never enabled it before. Much to my surprise, I had a bad DIMM. It passed the motherboard's memory test (once I enabled it, just to check), but apparently Windows runs some sort of RAM test when booting. Apparently, it flags the bad RAM and on the second (warm) boot, just ignores it. There is a great freeware program at that I used to prove it was in fact a bad DIMM.
It's also possible (if it is bad RAM) to limit the amount of RAM windows accesses using MSCONFIG. If I limited my RAM usage to 64M I was able to boot without problem.
Hope this helps you somewhat
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