Windoews refuses to stay up

[shane25119]

Hello,
One of my friends has come to me with a computer problem (I'm the local computer guy at school) and I'm not quite sure how to go about solving this one: On bootup her computer will bring up Safe Mode, and about 10 seconds into booting up it will shut down. All the startup screens appear, its just Windows that will not run, its running Windows 98, about 2 or 3 years old.
Thanks in advance
Shane

 

[wolluf]

Need some history on this - like when did this start happening, and what had been done to/happened to machine shortly before that (hardware/software change, virus, major crash..)

 

[ski]

-Restart the computer, press the Del key(or whatever key is specified on the 1st screen at startup) to enter CMOS Setup, use the arrow keys to highlight Default, Standard, or Setup settings, press Enter, press Y at the warning(if it appears), highlight Save And Exit, press Enter, press Y at the warning, insert the Windows boot floppy disk, press Enter, select 'Start Windows Without CD-ROM Support',
press Enter, at the A:\> prompt type dir c: and press Enter:
(1)If you do not see the contents of the hard drive, then it has a problem(defective, loose cable, or disabled or bad IDE1 controller).
(2)If you see your hard drive's contents, then do the following:
-If your hard drive is using 3rd party overlay or compression software, make sure it's properly configured.
-Use an antivirus floppy to check the hard drive for a virus(see your antivirus program's instructions).
-Type scandisk c: at the A:\> prompt, and press Enter to fix any errors.
-If no good, then type C: at the A:\> prompt, press Enter, type fdisk /mbr at the C:\> prompt and press Enter to replace the master boot record.
-If still no good, then type sys c: at the A:\> prompt, and press Enter to replace the system files.
-If nothing works, then the memory may be bad.

 

[Marcs41]

2-3 years old 98?
I would not spend too much time on trying to solve that. Get the data off and do a fresh install. In about 1 to 2 hours (depending PC speed) you will have it up and running smoothly again, as new.

Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC![/sub]

 

[shane25119]

thank you all much, i will try those