I think my O/S just died on me...

[Force Flow]

Today, when I started up my older PC, I got the regular POST, but then after it said "loading windows 98", all I got was a screen with a blinking line. I left it for about 15min to see if it would come up on its own. It didn't. The line went away too.

I'm running win98SE (which has been running for about three years. I think I jinxed it by saying it's been running fine without any major problems ). I also have the windows loading screen turned off. I can get into safe mode.

It's a 300MHz Cyrix II, Gigabyte GA-5AX mobo, 13GB HDD with about 1.6GB free, 96MB RAM, 48x CD drive. I know that's not much to go on, but I don't know too much about the hardware in the system.

[cuffs007]

anything in your cd or floppy drive?... able to do a virus scan or scan disk in safe mode?...

Best of luck

[Force Flow]

Nothing in the drives. Haven't been on the net for over a month with that machine, so I seriously doubt there are any viruses.

I haven't installed any programs either.

[Cricket]

If you can get into Safe Mode, then your OS isn't "dead". One of the virtual drivers is probably hanging the load up of Windows.

First thing I would do is disconnect any optical drives and see if it boots to Windows.

If not, boot to the Boot Menu and chose the Logged Boot option and reboot. Let it try to boot to Windows again. Then reboot to Safe Mode and look for the bootlog.txt in the root directory and check it to see what could be causing the hangup.

While you're in Safe Mode, check in Device Manager and look for duplicate entries for your components and remove any extras.

If you still can't figure out what's causing the hang up, remove all the PCI cards and install them one by one booting to Windows between the installation of each card. When the system hangs, the last card may be the culprit.

Cricket