Laptop nightmare

[kenner]

I broke the absolute rule of never touching someone else's pc or offering suggestions today and ended up in horrorville. When the owner told me he was going to do some major cleanups, I suggested he make sure he could access his COMPAQ with a boot disk. He could at first; booted to A:. However after removing the floppy, then shutting down, the laptop would no longer boot; it stopped with a fatal VFAT error! No restore disks available but I don't think they would have helped given the sequence at which the laptop halted. Finally, after a half dozen tries, we did get into safemode and I exported the registry to disk. Then with trepidation, let the system reboot and it came up normal. WHY would a MICROSOFT WIN98 boot disk cause this? If you need to use a floppy boot disk, is there a way to prevent the above? Or is the above a glitch predicting other problems in the future?

[Budfred]

I am not sure that I understand the sequence of events, but I would certainly urge your friend to backup his data now... I would then download the diagnostic software for the hard drive and run it to see if it is dying...

[Rick]

Look real close at that boot floppy also.
where did it come from ?
When was the last time he did a Virus scan on the laptop ?
If the floppy came from another system. SCAN it now for Virus
Boot sector Virus to be exact

[kenner]

The floppy is the genuine Microsoft that came with his desktop pc; also WIN98SE. AVG is up to date. Can a generic HD diagnostic work? any software suggestions? The HD isn't a name I recognize; something COMPAQ put in.

[kenner]

Sequence: Started laptop with boot disk no problems indicated. It went to A drive. Went to C: and shut down. Restarted pc assuming it would start WIN98 normally. VFAT error This latter step repeated several times Finally got it to accept safemode but not sure how. Then after copying a critical financial data file, shut off and rebooted. It started normally. Should a COMPAQ laptop start with a WIN98 boot disk with no problems?

[Paul Komski]

VFAT (http://pclt.cis.yale.edu/pclt/BOOT/VFAT.htm) is a file system generally utilised by Win95 or WinNT to give long file name support, where it didn't previously exist. You don't give the exact message but Error Message: VFAT Device Initialization Failed (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q139/0/63.asp&NoWebContent=1) is described under Win95/98 - if that was the message you were getting.

"It is possible for additions to a VFAT file structure to be damaged if the disk is manipulated by a DOS or OS/2 disk utility that does not understand the new structure of the file system" - would be another possible explanation.

Just wonder if the difficulty in booting up normally was due to warm reboots, with residual information in RAM causing problems. Sometimes, especially with Laptops, it is hard to know if the system has been totally powered down and thereby allowing a true cold reboot.

It is hard to believe (boot sector virus excluded) that simply booting to a floppy boot diskette and reading data on a HDD could do any harm. It sounds like you were just unlucky. Could still be worth running scandisk from Safe Mode - he he - after a cold reboot. ;)