Windows98 illegal operations.

[little louie]

Can anyone help?

A colleague at work came to me with the following problem and it's well past my capabilities:

He booted his laptop which runs windows 98, and on opening internet explorer, he was prompted to allow the computer to look for windows updates. He allowed it and after a short period on microsoft's web pages, the laptop froze and wouldn't respond. He rebooted and windows will no longer load.

Now, after boot, the laptop attempts to load windows. The following illegal operation notices then appear:

Rundll32
Ati2plxx
Runonce
Rnaapp
xplorer

After closing each illegal operation notification, the screen remains blank (a dark blue background with a small square in the middle - not the standard b.s.o.d. blue)

Double clicking on the screen gives the following illegal operation notice:

Msgsrv32

The only option then is to reset.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks folks.

LL

[neochivers]

no affence but update the OS to sum better like Linux where there is never a bsod ... kill the bsod

[little louie]

Couldn't agree more, and that is the plan, but we need information off the hard-drive before re-formatting it.

[glc]

Remove the hard drive from the laptop, connect it to a notebook-to-IDE adapter, and slave it into a desktop computer to get your data off.

Example of an adapter (I know you aren't in the US, but it's an example for you):

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108&cat=HDD

Have you tried safe mode yet? If there's not a lot of data, you can get the data off with floppies in safe mode.

[little louie]

Hold F8 on boot for safe mode?

If that doesn't work, the adaptor looks like a great idea, thanks.

[glc]

Tap F8 several times. I don't think holding it will do it.

[little louie]

Got the data off the hard drive in safe mode.

Thanks

LL