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General discussion

Boot menu

by ice_bear_joe May 28, 2005 11:22AM PDT

Friend has an old ibm pc300pl using win98(dont know if se or not as never seen it bootup before there is no cd the win98 cab files are on the hard drive,seen this by using floppy boot and doing a dir) Was working ok for surfing and getting e-mails thats all he uses it for.His brother used it today and tried putting some online casino on there and now only get a blank screen when bootup.Only way to see anything on screen is to do a ctrl alt del and empty window comes up not even explorer file.
Would like to get into boot menu to try safe mode or scanreg /restore but on bootup tried all the keys i can think of and all i get is keyboard errors.Only computer i'v ever run across that i could'nt get into win98 boot menu.Anyone knows how to with this old ibm.Tks.

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5 Posts
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Re. above
by ice_bear_joe May 28, 2005 11:26AM PDT

on bootup it gives option for f1 to enter system setup

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F8
by ramusson May 28, 2005 1:15PM PDT

Keep tapping F8 key on bootup. Win98 will give the botup options.

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Were you able to get into safemode yet?
by TONI H May 28, 2005 9:01PM PDT

Does this computer have a burner type cdrom? If you can get to the normal desktop and if there is a cdburner device installed, you can create your own W98 install disk by burning the whole CABS folder (or the whole OPTIONS folder if there are subfolders other than CABS there), and get the Product code Key from the registry.

As for the video....if you can get into safemode, go to MSCONFIG and look at the autoexec.bat and config.sys files and uncheck anything there that normally wouldn't be there. Also look at the system.ini and win.ini tabs for the 'boot' area and uncheck anything that says 'load=' or 'run=' that looks suspicious. Now go to the startup tab and uncheck any dialer type programs that might be there (or empty RUN= lines) as the online game installation might have entered something there to force an automatic connection during the boot up.

TONI

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Tks for replies
by ice_bear_joe May 29, 2005 12:28AM PDT

I was using win98 boot disk and trying several things and on one reboot with the floppy removed it went to the boot menu, dont know why never touched anything.
Was able to get to c: and did a scanreg /restore to the day before he meshed it up and now all ok.

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If you can use a burner device
by TONI H May 29, 2005 12:50AM PDT

or even have an external one you could hook up to his computer temporarily, don't forget to burn that Options or Options/Cabs folder to get him a Windows installation disk.

The Product code Key is located at the following area in the Registry....

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/MICROSOFT/WINDOWS/ and click the words CURRENT FOLDER......on the right hand side is where the code is listed.

TONI

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