joea64
05-08-2002, 04:30 PM
Some of you folks may recall the trouble I had back at the end of March when the Chernobyl (W95.CIH) virus attacked my system and forced me to reinstall. Well, here I am again, early May, and I'm working on reinstalling Windows 98 SE again. No virus is involved this time, thank heavens - my system was clean according to the last system scan I did - but the exact origin of the problem is deuced difficult to run down, though I have some ideas.
System specs:
Duron 800
20.0 GB and 13.0 GB hard drives
512 MB RAM
nVidia TNT2 M64 AGP, 32 MB video
Onboard sound (AC'97 codec)
CD-RW (Sony CRX-140E) and DVD (BTC BDV212B) drives on secondary IDE channel
A couple of days ago, I started having random freezes on my machine. I ran Norton Speed Disk last evening and noticed that the C: drive was seriously fragmented, so I started up a defragment operation. Unfortunately, the system locked up about 70% through the defrag operation and I was forced to reboot (reset button). At that point, I continued the defrag operation, which concluded with no further problems.
So I was OK, right? Not hardly. I rebooted and about half an hour later, the system froze up again. This time, when I reset, I got ScanReg which told me that there was a problem with the registry and it was looking for a good copy of same. It found one - or what it thought was one - and loaded. _Then_ a window popped up saying that Windows had found a problem with the registry and was going to automatically reboot and select a new copy of the registry.
Windows managed to reboot to normal mode several times after that, but various system files refused to load or could not be found. Finally, I gave up and switched to Safe Mode (which proceeded to run OK for close to 18 hours without locking up, which helps me presume that this is a Windows problem and not a hardware one). I backed up all my data files to the secondary HD, and a few minutes ago I reformatted C: and am now just about to start reinstalling Win98.
Why did this happen? I don't know, but I have several theories:
1) Various device drivers may not have been properly installed. I remember that while Win98 installed smoothly, I had a good deal of trouble with some device drivers (the audio drivers, for example, and also the printer and scanner drivers).
2) As a corollary to this, Norton Antivirus 2002 has caused some problems on my system; I had to turn automatic system scan off because automatic scan (which usually took place after the system had been in use for some time) froze up the system almost identically to what's been happening this week. If I do reinstall Norton Systemworks, I may just stick with Systemworks 2001, and try not to install NAV if I can avoid it (it's fairly well integrated with the main, though) and go with AVG instead like I was advised these many weeks ago.
3) I had trouble a couple of weekends ago while installing the games Tropico and Superpower. The Tropico install locked up my system several times because the InstallShield routine for it is screwed up - I had to rename the existing Installshield directory to "InstallshieldOld" before setup could proceed. With Superpower, the install required the installation of DirectX 8.1. I duly did this, but it seems that the install of that program may not have gone correctly; when I attempted to run the game after installing DirectX 8.1 from the game CD, the screen went completely back - the system didn't lock up completely, I was able to do a Ctrl-Alt-Del. However, after that, my system experienced odd video problems intermittently, especially when running DVD's; I couldn't play more than one DVD in sequence, or the screen would go black with the second DVD and force me to reboot.
4) A week or so later, I updated the drivers for my nVidia TNT2 M64-based card. I had my choice of drivers, reference drivers from nVidia or the most recent drivers from Powercolor (the manufacturer of that particular card). I chose to use the nVidia reference drivers. The problem is - or may have been, I don't know - that I didn't uninstall the previously existing drivers before installing the new ones. Maybe I should have, I don't know.
5) There seem to have been a couple of device conflicts on my system that I was never quite able to track down - the conflicting device was identified as a "PCI Multimedia device". That _may_ have been my video capture card (a Hauppage WinTV GO), though when I tried that card it always worked fine.
6) Finally, some software I installed may have altered system files so that the Registry got screwed up when I tried to disable automatic elements of the software. (I'm speaking, in particular, of the Earthlink 5.0 disk, and the Update Manager it contained - I noted, though it might not be connected in any way, that my worst problems last night came _after_ I disabled the Update Manager in the Startup tab of msconfig.)
Well....what does everyone think might be the real cause? And has anyone experienced a sequence of problems even remotely similar to mine?
-Joe-
------------------
Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com
System specs:
Duron 800
20.0 GB and 13.0 GB hard drives
512 MB RAM
nVidia TNT2 M64 AGP, 32 MB video
Onboard sound (AC'97 codec)
CD-RW (Sony CRX-140E) and DVD (BTC BDV212B) drives on secondary IDE channel
A couple of days ago, I started having random freezes on my machine. I ran Norton Speed Disk last evening and noticed that the C: drive was seriously fragmented, so I started up a defragment operation. Unfortunately, the system locked up about 70% through the defrag operation and I was forced to reboot (reset button). At that point, I continued the defrag operation, which concluded with no further problems.
So I was OK, right? Not hardly. I rebooted and about half an hour later, the system froze up again. This time, when I reset, I got ScanReg which told me that there was a problem with the registry and it was looking for a good copy of same. It found one - or what it thought was one - and loaded. _Then_ a window popped up saying that Windows had found a problem with the registry and was going to automatically reboot and select a new copy of the registry.
Windows managed to reboot to normal mode several times after that, but various system files refused to load or could not be found. Finally, I gave up and switched to Safe Mode (which proceeded to run OK for close to 18 hours without locking up, which helps me presume that this is a Windows problem and not a hardware one). I backed up all my data files to the secondary HD, and a few minutes ago I reformatted C: and am now just about to start reinstalling Win98.
Why did this happen? I don't know, but I have several theories:
1) Various device drivers may not have been properly installed. I remember that while Win98 installed smoothly, I had a good deal of trouble with some device drivers (the audio drivers, for example, and also the printer and scanner drivers).
2) As a corollary to this, Norton Antivirus 2002 has caused some problems on my system; I had to turn automatic system scan off because automatic scan (which usually took place after the system had been in use for some time) froze up the system almost identically to what's been happening this week. If I do reinstall Norton Systemworks, I may just stick with Systemworks 2001, and try not to install NAV if I can avoid it (it's fairly well integrated with the main, though) and go with AVG instead like I was advised these many weeks ago.
3) I had trouble a couple of weekends ago while installing the games Tropico and Superpower. The Tropico install locked up my system several times because the InstallShield routine for it is screwed up - I had to rename the existing Installshield directory to "InstallshieldOld" before setup could proceed. With Superpower, the install required the installation of DirectX 8.1. I duly did this, but it seems that the install of that program may not have gone correctly; when I attempted to run the game after installing DirectX 8.1 from the game CD, the screen went completely back - the system didn't lock up completely, I was able to do a Ctrl-Alt-Del. However, after that, my system experienced odd video problems intermittently, especially when running DVD's; I couldn't play more than one DVD in sequence, or the screen would go black with the second DVD and force me to reboot.
4) A week or so later, I updated the drivers for my nVidia TNT2 M64-based card. I had my choice of drivers, reference drivers from nVidia or the most recent drivers from Powercolor (the manufacturer of that particular card). I chose to use the nVidia reference drivers. The problem is - or may have been, I don't know - that I didn't uninstall the previously existing drivers before installing the new ones. Maybe I should have, I don't know.
5) There seem to have been a couple of device conflicts on my system that I was never quite able to track down - the conflicting device was identified as a "PCI Multimedia device". That _may_ have been my video capture card (a Hauppage WinTV GO), though when I tried that card it always worked fine.
6) Finally, some software I installed may have altered system files so that the Registry got screwed up when I tried to disable automatic elements of the software. (I'm speaking, in particular, of the Earthlink 5.0 disk, and the Update Manager it contained - I noted, though it might not be connected in any way, that my worst problems last night came _after_ I disabled the Update Manager in the Startup tab of msconfig.)
Well....what does everyone think might be the real cause? And has anyone experienced a sequence of problems even remotely similar to mine?
-Joe-
------------------
Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com