Win 98 goes into DOS after a half an hour idle?

[JTH]

Hi, I'm working on a friends old Pentium 1 Win 98 computer with 48mb RAM. I thought I'd fixed all of its problems but when I go to do a Disk Defrag and leave the computer idle to go at it (it takes a while!) I come back after about 30 mins to find the computer is in DOS with just a flashing prompt. You can't type anything but when I press Ctrl + Alt + Delete twice it restarts.

I've gone into Control Panal -> Power and found "turn off hard disk" was enabled for after 30 mins. I changed it to "never" and the settings have definately been applied. I was sure this would fix this but it didn't. Any other ideas?

Thanks, JTH

[GaryRouth]

Try setting all the power options to "Never", and also look in on the Bios settings for Power. Since it's an early model Pentium, you might want to disable Power Management altogether, until all troubleshooting is finished.
. . . Gary

[Designer]

Power management should'nt turn anything off if there's disk activity (as far as i know) so power management shouldnt affect that. Could be that another program is running in the background causing it to do that, before running Defrg hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and see what you've got running, close everything except explorer.

[JTH]

I've closed all non-essential programs and set all power management options to zero but it doesn't seem to have an effect. Any other ideas?

[Designer]

Have you run scandisk first? might just be playing up because there are lots of errors on the drive

[thorlo6]

Hey JTH. My PC has a Celeron @500MHz running Win98 2nd. I've seen some pretty weird things happen on mine but, never that. Try doing what Designer suggested. That maybe the problem. Also, you said that defrag takes awhile. What size HDD does this PC have. Even with a Pentium CPU with Win98 shouldn't take very long to run defrag, unless you have a large HDD. My son's PC is an old Pentium @166MHz with Win95, but it only has a 1.9Gb HDD. Defrag usually only takes a few minutes. Never mind, I'm getting off the subject. Unless you or someone else finds out the problem, I'll check around on my Pc and see if I can find an answer for you.thorlo6

[Designer]

In reply to Thrlo6's post, the time defrag takes does depend on the size of the hard drive, but also on how full the hard drive is and how badly fragmented the data is.

If you watch defrag, do you constantly get the message on the bar at the bottom saying "Drives contents changed, restarting" before it get's to 10% and displays the drive. If so it may be that scandisk is needed, also run disk cleanup and get rid of the old stuff you dont need.

[GaryRouth]

Hi again

JTH - is the PC OK now?

If not, some other things to look at:
1) see if Defrag runs OK in Safe Mode
2) see if ScanDisk runs OK in Safe Mode (like Designer suggested)
3) use the hard disk diagnostics from the manufacturer's website to test the health of the hard drive.
4) if you suspect the memory at all, test the memory too (I don't have my links handy, but several should be mentioned at download.com & such)
5) Full system antivirus/antispyware scan!
6) . . . the Swiss Army Knife approach: an "ove-the-top" reinstall - for mysterious problems with no obvious culprit [http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=70846]
. . . Gary

[Designer]

As GaryRouth suggested, test the memory,

You can download Memtest86 from the site i've liked to below:

http://www.memtest86.com/

Hope this is of some use

D

[JTH]

Thanks for all the imput. I will check out these suggestions and get back to you!

JTH