windows 98 terror!!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter beezelbubba
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beezelbubba

beezelbubba

Shitty Buddhist
windows 98 is freezing on the white cloud screen at bootup.
The other day when I was booting up I noticed the"fatal error"blue screen flash briefly underneath the white cloud screen.However,windows continued to load and I was able to proceed as normal.
The next day I went to start my computer and it wouldnt get past those miserable white clouds.I cant start it in safe mode.I tried to do a fresh install but scandisk gets stuck at 38%when scanning the file directory.
Can anyone help this poor dumb sap before he goes and sucks a tailpipe?
 
Have you given up on your present installation and are trying to do a fresh install? Do you have backups of everything you need? Good. If formatting the drive doesn't work, then you need fdisk to erase everything on your hard disk, including the file system and recreate the file system and format the drive. This will of course erase all data on the disk but judging from the scandisk results, it seems like you have a damaged file system and that can be really trick or even impossible to fix. A lot of people here have written leghty post about fdisk and I will be boring as usual and ask you to search yourself. What size is your hard disk? You may want to partition it differently depending on size or look into a second drive if you only have one.

/Ola
 
I suppose I am giving up on the present installation,unless
you would recommend otherwise.
The drive is a 30gig maxtor7200rpm.It is partitioned into
3 drives.
C: OS:5gig
D: Programs:5gig
E: Audio:20gig
Will it be possible to just reformat the C:drive or should the whole thing be wiped clean.I do have backups of all important material.
Thanks alot for your response ola
beezelbubba
 
I am afraid it does sound like a bad hard disk.

If you know someone else with a Windows 98 system, make yourself a boot floppy, or a Win98 startup floppy. Then copy the "dos" version of Scandisk onto it (you will find it in the Windows\command folder). Then boot your computer up vial floppy and run scandisk. If it chokes again on the drive, it is most likely a bad drive.

If you give up on the system and re-FDISK it (like Ola says theres a lot of info elsewhere on how to do this) , format from your boot floppy and watch carefully. If it shows bad sectors, or pauses for a long time in one spot, or the drive starts making noise, then just toss it out and buy a new drive. Or check on the drive manufactures web site, it may be in warrenty and you can get a free replacement.
 
There is a second utility called chkdsk.exe that sometimes finds issues that scandisk doesn't. Another option for you to try is getting norton disk doctor (or whatever it is called nowadays), and running that over your system.

But i've got to concur with the others and say that it sounds like a problem with the physical media (ie: the disk is toast)

- gaffa
 
As your disk is neatly partitioned, you can try formatting just the C: drive. You may need chkdsk to fix errors on the drive first, or after. If you have access to partition magic(the boot disks), you can delete the C: partition and recreate it in the same place and then format it, just to make sure that you really wipe it clean. Maybe you can do this with fdisk as well or maybe fdisk will screw up your drive letters. Try it, fool around with the disk. You have nothing to loose. I have never had a physical disk failure in the ten or so years that I've been into computers (that have hard disks) so I always rule out that option. Knock on wood.

BTW, are you happy with 98 as your recording OS or are you looking into getting NT? If you want NT and 98 on the same computer, you need to partition your disk in a certain way to make sure that you can install both OSes.

/Ola
 
BTW fdisk, format, chkdsk and scandsk are all on the 98 startup disk. Let us know how it goes.

/O
 
98 certainly doesn't help audio much does it?

I have a few bad sectors on one of my drives, and it hasn't been an issue at all! When I do fresh installs, and run format, it becomes more of a time issue, but I am patient and let it do it's thing. Once my OS is installed, it runs fine.

You probably did get a bad sector on your drive, and it could very well have been at a spot where some OS files were loaded, thus, you can't boot the OS. Don't despair, REPAIR!

The advice above is good, but I seriously doubt you need a new drive. Bad sectors happen. Scandisk seems to know what to do with them. Let it do it.

A 5GB partition is pretty large for any OS. Try at the MOST 2GB, and if you are just running 98, 500MB would be fine. Just go ahead and do a 1GB partition for the heck of it. Save the rest of that space for audio! :) Also, you probably only need about 2GB for your applications, and that is even a bit excessive. I am running a bunch of stupid applications on the NT platform, and I only have about 544MB used on a 1GB partition for applications. I could get it under that if I was using a 98 machine and had to worry about corrupting the registry. I would only load what was essential on a 98 machine if it was going to be used as a DAW. Extra stuff just increases the risk of the system going bad, like it did for you.

I was searching around here earlier, and it would seem that that Slackmaster dude knows his business about computers. Maybe YOU could do a search on him and read some of his posts. Maybe he would answer a directed question to him even.

Good luck.
 
Thanx to everyone for your suggestions,except R White and Gaffa because theyre telling me things I dont want to hear!!
Just kidding(please god of computerisms,dont let my hard drive die)
I would like to try NT ola,although I dont have any particular complaints about 98.I just built this system in December and frankly I have no buisiness building computers,so I havent been able to play around long enough
to really get pissed at windows98.
Im going to try these suggestions but being the novice I am,I hope you guys will pop in from time to time to bail my sorry ass out
Thanx everyone.
Beezelbubba
 
No problem. I get a little jaded about hardware because in my day job I do support for 200+ PCs. I just had two hard drives go bad in the last two days - although in fairness they were a few years old and had been driven pretty hard, like all our gear.

I would not use Chkdsk for anything except to tell me how much free space is on a drive. Scandisk is weak enough, but Chkdsk is an ancient holdover from old MS-DOS that is still around only because some programs call it in batch files and such.

In the OLD days - I mean 1985 or so, when 40 meg drives were a big deal - it was common to have some bad sectors on a hard drive. Manufactures would even ship new drives with some bad sectors on them, writing out where the sectors were on a label. But now it is quite unusual to have bad sectors unless the drive is getting ready to take a dump. Sound Cracker is correct in that you can live with bad sectors if you are careful, but I would not trust it. Drives are cheap and time is not - would you rather buy a new 30 gig drive for $99, or spend three days rebuilding your system after your drive crashes? Not to mention those audio files you lost...
 
just a thought

i had similiar problems with my old system a 366 celeron with only 2 pci slots and one isa.it definitely wasn't the hard drive at fault. it was hardware conflicts and not enough irqs.sometimes to boot the tech had replace my pci modem card with a graphics card just to troubleshoot.i frequently had to completely remove the modem in safe mode. also i would change settings in the bios,plug and play no then yes then back.i can't remember all the tweaking in the bios and safe mode but if the other suggestions fail try removing some pci cards and strip your system down to bare essentials then use process of elimination to determine if and where a conflict exist.my old celeron runs fine now that my scsi controller and sound card are in the new pc,(asus cusl i put together myself)
 
Back up and running(whew!!!)I reformatted drive c and windows loaded from the cd with no problem.A completely new boot too.The last time I reinstalled windows,it came up with my customised wallpaper and all the drivers that were there
when I made the startup disk.This time I got the pukey green wallpaper and nothing but windows.This is good,before I had all kinds of crap accumulated since I built it.I want to make the system as lean as possible this time.I dont think Im going to put the modem back in.I have my silly Compaq
for internet.
Any advice for getting the most out of my modest system
would be greatly appreciated
celeron 533
maxtor 30g7200
96mgspc100sdram(to little I know)
ensoniq pci64soundcard(cheap but sounds ok till
I can afford better)
creative cdblaster cdrw
n-track 2.2
blueline plugins
like I said,modest!!!
thanx for everyones help!!!!beezelbubba
 
Congrats on your newly washed system.

My biggest recomendation is to BACK UP your system once you have your music stuff re-installed, but before you fill it up with games and other software.

Here is one tip for you, and everyone, to get a bit more speed out of your Win 98 PC.

Go into Control Panel / System / Performance / File System / Hard Disk. In the line where it says "Typical Role of This Computer" it will probably say "Desktop Computer". Change this to read "Network Server" and reboot. What this does is to allocate more of your RAM to cacheing. You don't want to do this if you have < 64 meg RAM, and its better if you have 128 meg, but you will see a modest speed increase once you make this change.
 
Thanx RWhite.
Its good to have it running again,but I got a ways to go before Im recording again.I did get the soundcard up and running with only a little trouble.My wav.files on drive E
are intact.Happy about that.
I decided to install my modem "cause I want to download the latest version of directx.The modem seemed to install fine
but when I went to install my isp software(small local provider)I had to restart my pc halfway through the install.
Then I got a windows protection error(device ptvcd or something like that).Had to go into safe mode a number of times to figure out what to get rid of.Im still not sure
what I did,but I got windows to load again(several times).
As a result,Im very reluctant to install my modem again.Do
you know If the version of directx that comes w/win98 is
adequate(I believe its 5.2 the latest being 7.1?).
I still have to load my cdrw and graphics card drivers so there is still danger lurking around every corner.I thank you muchly for your kind consideration!!

p.s.when you say"backup"my system once I have my music stuff
re-installed,do you mean /w a startup disk or something else?(aren't I stupid)
 
Beezel: This latest thing could be a symptom of the same problem that brought you down in the first place :(. Keep your eyes on your drive, and backup important data more often than usual. You might check out SpinRite: http://grc.com/sroverview.htm -- it costs $89, but it should be well worth the cost if it does what it claims. I've never used it but I plan to get it.

RWhite: I read the opposite somewhere... that servers are optimized to cache and serve out small documents and aren't designed well for the big chunks of audio that we deal with. The thing I read suggested using "desktop PC" as the typical role and tweaking cache settings by hand. I don't know if I'd be able to tell a difference... drive through-put has never been the bottleneck for me.
 
You might want to get an applicaiton called Norton Ghost. It makes an image of everything that's on a partition so when you have installed all software that you need and made the Windows customisations that you like, you simply use ghost to capture that in a partition/drive image. Then, when you want to go back to that fresh install, simply use ghost again to replace the entire C: partition with what's on the image and you have a nice new install without the hassle of installing all the applications etc.

Ghost fits on a floppy and you use ut by first booting with a 98 startup disc and then run ghost.exe from the floppy. Ghost is pretty self-explanatory and what you want to do is make a drive image of C: and put it on another partition. You can try the different compression rates to see if it makes much of a difference.

Good luck

/O
 
Thanx pg and ola.Im deffinately interested in Norton
Ghost because this has been a royal fucking pain.Im starting to miss my vs840.I am learning much though.I still have to
install my cdrw software and that fills me w/fear and forboding.Wish me luck,and thanx for help.
Beezelbubba
 
I HIGHLY recomend Norton Ghost. Use it all the time in my job and it makes life much, much better. HOWEVER... to get full benifit from Ghost you should really have a second hard drive and a CD burner. That way you can write a Ghost image of your entire C: drive to your second drive. Ghost lets you span the Images, so you can set a maximun file size of 650 megs and thus make a backup of multiple 650 meg files. Then you burn each one to a CDR. once done, your C: drive can go down in flames and all you need to do is put in a blank replacement, boot with a floppy, run Ghost, and start swapping CDRs into your drive. In a very short time you are 100% back to where you were when you made the backup.

As for "server" cacheing, I have not read anything regarding about caching large vs small files. As far as I know all it changes is your total RAM dedicated to cacheing. What you are talking about sounds more like disk cluster size - on a typical PC you want disk cluster size small as possible, but on a drive storing just huge audio files a large cluster size is better.

As for Spinrite, I used it many years ago and was happy with it. I ordered it again about a year ago - version 5.0 - and was quite disappointed. Seems like it does not even run unless the drive you are testing is 100% OK, which defeats the whole point of it. And when it does run it will go for literally days and then find no problems.
 
Turned on the computer this morning and it was all screwed up again(same problem).To my credit I got it all back up in about an hour.This sucks though!!!!It worked fine for a week.Can anyone explain this to me?What changes in a week.Ghost or no Ghost I gotta solve this .Probably need a new HD huh?Cash is a little tight right now,so maybe I just need to go through this nonsense once a week till I can afford a new drive.Thanks to anyone who can offer insight.
Beezelbubba
 
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