Husbands computer won't boot up

M

missy1462

Geek Trainee
Hi all, boy do I need help. My husband has an older computer that a friend gave to him. It has Win 98 on it and it worked like a charm up till last night. He turned it back on and it would not finish the start up (I'm not real computer savvy, so I don't know for sure if I'm saying the right words or not ...). It goes thru the start up, then goes to the Win 98 splash screen, and instead of going to the desktop view, his webshots background photo comes up along with an hourglass and pointer. Nothing ever happens after that. I tried to start it up in safe mode, but after I select safe mode, the next screen tells me that it can't detect his mouse and if I want to install a mouse, then I have to turn the comptuer off. This morning I found another mouse and hooked it up instead, but I keep getting the same error message when I tried to go into safe mode.
I honestly don't know much about how to use it, but I did put in his floppy start up disk, and did a chkdsk and scandisk and they were ok. I tried that SYS c: just in case there was some startup files that had become corrupted or something, but that didn't help. I'm at the end of what little knowledge I have on what to do now. Does anyone have any suggestions or help they might offer?
Thanks
Missy
 
Firstly in any computer using Windows when you boot up into Safe Mode you will not have the option of using a Mouse - If the mouse is USB.

To use a Mouse in Safe Mode you will need to use a "Ball Mouse" ie an old horrible mouse, these use round connection which has lots of pins in at the end of the mouse cable, this plugs in to a purple plug at the back of your computer (there are two circular plugs at the very top of the plug area).

As for the computer it's self having problems, i would most likely say that Windows is corrupt, this basically means that your hard drive - where you store all your files (where Windows loads from) is corrupted, this means some of the Windows file maybe damaged and are stopping the computer from working.

However before we jump to conclusions i would recommend that you get a "ball" mouse start up in Safe Mode and run: Scan Disk and Defragment Disk these can be found in:

Start > Accessories > System Tools

Post back any details or changes once you have done this.
 
The mouse was a usb, but the mouse I found and tried this morning had the round connector on the end of it, and I found a connector that hooked on the end that allowed me to plug it into a serial "connection" or whatever I should call it. There is one place on the back of the computer that takes that "round" connector like is on the end of the old type mouse, but out of the three different mouses' I found and tried this morning, none of them would fit in that particular connection. Am I making sense?
So ... after I hooked another mouse up to the serial connector, and tried it that way, it was still giving me the error message about the mouse....??? :confused: What do I do now?

Missy
 
Definitely, all your mice, old and new, usb or ps2 are fine. I think there's something wrong with the system boot files. Can you boot? If so, then listen to ProcalX and defrag and scan the system. It might work after that. If it doesn't, stick in a boot disk and at the dos prompt, type "sys a: c:" and press enter. This will copy the system files from the disk drive to the hard drive. Restart the computer and see if it works.
Last resort - backup your personal files on to floppies or usb drive and reformat HD and reinstall windows.
 
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