not booting up

[NYR99]

Hello, i have a compaq running win 98. when i booted it up before, a thing came up saying something about the registry and that windows would have to restart to fix the problem. when it resarted, nothing loaded, just a black screen saying invalid system disk, press any key to continue. and that just kept on comeing up. it was working fine yesterday. what should i do (reformat=last resort)

[ktkendall]

If you have the win98 boot floppy, you can boot from it and do a scanreg /fix and if that doesn't fix it you can do a scanreg /restore that will give you a choice of your last 5 saved registry files to restore from. You will see the dates they were saved on, pick one that is before your troubles began and it will restore to that one and reboot to the harddrive and that may fix it.

[NYR99]

where can i get a win98 boot?

[newme]

try here http://www.bootdisk.com/

[ktkendall]

Anyone you know that has a PC runnin win98 that has a floppy drive can make you one too.

[NYR99]

i made one from bootdisk.com, put the floppy in my lap top...the black screen came up saying please remove all disks and other media, then press any key kto restart. i did that, but instead of restarting, the comp said invalid systen disk. if i put the 98 boot disk in again, it says please remove to restart, the i pressed any key, the it said invalid system disk....hmmmmmmmm

[ktkendall]

How did you go about it?? Did you download to harddrive, then put clean floppy in drive and execute the file you just downloaded??

[NYR99]

i d/l right onto a clean floppy.

[ktkendall]

You probably want to do as I suggested above. That file you download is not bootable itself, but is an executable that when executed will create a boot floppy for you. That is why I suggest, download to a directory on your harddrive so that the executable file itself will not take up space on the floppy disk. Just have a clean formatted floppy ready, and click on the file you downloaded, and it will create a boot floppy for you.

[NYR99]

ok, i made to disk...it worked. ii chose choice 2 (start w/o cd rom support. then an a: came up...i this is what i put in
A:/>SYS C:
then it did something, cause, when i now turn on my comp the windows loading screen comes but then goes to a black screen with a C:/> what do i do. and what is the command for format. i tried foram, format /all, format c:, fdisk, what do i do?

[NYR99]

well, i just formated and installed ME thanks for your help though.

[ktkendall]

Do you want to reformat and loose everything that was on the drive?? If so then you still need to boot from the floppy and it should boot up to 'a' prompt, then just do::
A:\>format C:
If you want to try and save that old load of win98 try scanreg /fix,
and if that doesn't work try scanreg /restore. It may not be a savable installation of win98 at this point though. You could also boot from floppy with cdrom suport and run the win98 setup program. I am not absolutely positive, but I think it will install overtop the old load and could save your data and programs that way. Win98 cdrom is bootable too, so that is another option if your PC supports boot from cdrom.

[ktkendall]

OK, glad you have a working machine now, and I'm sure you've learned a few things along the way.