PC in a coma

[granny1]

My sister has an AMD 700Mhz Athlon with 128MB RAM and a 17 GB (??? i dont remember the exact size, but somewhere around there) Quantum Fireball hard drive. The machine was working just fine last night and when it was booted this morning it would load up to the blue log Windows 98 screen but would hang and i could hear a repetitive noise from the hard drive, (sorta like when a CDR is trying be read but just ends up clanking back and forth). I tried to boot into safe mode but that wouldnt work either, then I tried to boot from floppy, didnt work either. Then i ran scandisk and it couldn't complete the scan, it would halt about halfway and give an "unable to read at cluster XXXXX, attempting to pass over it" (somethign to that effect). Then i ran a dos virus check and it came up clean. The odd thing to me is that I can look at all the files in the system, from the dos prompt, all except the windows directory. That event gives me an "Unable to read from drive, Abort Retry Fail" error.

Yesterday I installed Sonic Foundry's "Video Factory" and did some avi/mpg editing and shut down the computer and went out, then came back a few hours later and the computer was still working fine. I then worked on more video conversion and had a 1.5GB avi project and left that on the drive to continue today. Sonic Foundry has a strange copy-protection setup where they email you a registry entry that you have to add to the registry.
I'm wondering if this software and subsequent projects may have caused the crash??

I am trying to avoid reinstalling Win98 at all costs, i *DO NOT* want to reinstall unless i have no other choice :*(

any help is greatly appreciated.
my hair wasnt grey before, but after today, it is now >:O

[Paleo Pete]

If it makes you feel better, I NEVER recommend reinstalling unless it IS a last resort, and I prefer this to be agreed on by myself and a few of the other techs on here rather than on one person's recommendation alone. So we'll try to fix it first.

First thing I would suspect is the software you installed, and maybe you'll get lucky and have a registry backup that will do the trick.

Boot to a boot menu either using the [F8] key or holding down [Ctrl] while booting, and choose Command Prompt Only.
At the C:\> Prompt type:

scanreg_/restore using a space in place of the underscore ( _ ).

Choose a registry backup that was made before installing the program you suspect, the dates will be listed. Maybe it'll work, I've solved very similar problems several times using scanreg. scanreg_/fix will repair bad registry entries, for future reference. The restore option is the one you want this time.



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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[granny1]

Thanks for the suggestion!

I tried the following as you suggested:
> Boot to a boot menu either using the [F8] key or holding down [Ctrl] > while booting,

however whenever i choose ANY option from the boot menu, the hard drive continues to make that 'seeking' noise (as mentioned in my original post)
so it doesn't want to execute any of the options at all.

does it sound like there is something physically wrong with the drive?

I paid $50 for that software and would very much like to use it in the future, is there anyway to work around it not corrupting the registry (if it is indeed the culprit) ??

again, any suggestions are appreciated.

[griffinspc]

If you paid for the software you must have the complete disk so if you uninstall it completely, including Pete's suggestion of using a previous registry, you can try your machine in a "pristine" state.

If it works fine then re-install the program and see what happens but this time try and keep a clear and good backup before hand.

If it still doesn't work, sans the program and a clean registry, then you may indeed have a drive failing. At that point you can consider worst case senerios but I would immediately transfer all critical files you don't want to lose to whatever medium you have, zip or cd-r, whatever in case you lose the drive. If it does work then the 1st install possibly was not fully completed and you can go on your merry way with your program.

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"Finest KInd"

[granny1]

perhaps..... this is the exact same thing that has happened to me....
it sounds like the almost EXACT same problems i'm having.
I found this from a Dejanews post: (the subject had to do with the ASUS K7 AMD motherboard, same one thats on my sis' machine as well).
I forgot to mention too that the day before she had a screensaver that crashed teh system EXACTLY how this message snippet describes.

i really do NOT want to reinstall Win98, it took me so long to get teh networking configured right, i really do not want to do that again :*(

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" After another startup or two, I put the system in "suspend". In a couple of minutes I hit the spacebar to "resume" the system. The screen came to life, but the USB mouse was no longer moving the cursor. Using the keyboard, I shutdown (restarted) the system. The BIOS was then unable to find the operating system. Several tries, same bad results.
I booted with my emergency floppy, and ran scandisk on "C". It found and "fixed" many errors. The result was that the C-"root" directory contained only a few files whose names I did not recognize (no operating system files). All the directories had been renamed with numbers. The "D", "E", and "F" partitions on the hard drive were not affected (they were okay).
After unsuccessful attempts to (first) restore and (then, later) reinstall the operating system, I reformatted "C" and reinstalled the system and programs from scratch."
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[granny1]

oops sorry, i didnt read the message right, this is not *THE* exact situation I have. My files did not get renamed, but my sister did get crashed whenever she'd try and resume after the screensaver went on, the mouse wouldn't work and the only way we coudl get out of 'black screen' mode was to hit the spacebar.

griffinspc, thanks for the suggestion, i tried it and it didnt work. I can't uninstall Video Factory because I can only run in DOS mode and it says it needs to be in Windows to uninstall. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif