Hello,
To begin, I apologize for the length of this, but there seems to be much
to describe for the sake of clarity.
The problem machine is a vanilla P54-133 with Mach64, 3-COM NIC, 1 EIDE
HD and CD-ROM. It had been running WfW 3.11 without problem and after
installing Win95 it also seemed to run fine. Since it is used by our
secretary, who does a lot of literature searches with Netscape and
special database programs, I upgraded it from 16-32MB RAM (4 identical
8MB simms) and put in a Creative SB AWE 32.
After this hardware installation Win 95 refused to complete the boot
process, stopping after loading the background image (or color) with a
movable mouse pointer, but nothing else. Pressing ctrl-alt-del brought
up the task list and it was completely empty. Another ctrl-alt-del
rebooted with no error messages to the same point. Config.sys and
autoexec.bat contain nothing but keyboard stuff for the German keyboard.
I removed the new hardware and this condition was not corrected. Since
the CD-ROM (slave on the secondary IDE) had been acting up anyway, I
replaced it and lo-and-behold the machine booted properly. I put in the
sound card and extra memory and to my delight everything worked fine.
After installing all of the other software the machine seemed great for
about two weeks until the secretary broke her arm and then it sat for a
few weeks unused.
Now it once again refuses to boot past the desktop background and
nothing I do (removing all extraneous hardware, swapping out simms,
etc.) corrects the problem. There are no error message and when
restarting it does not go into protected mode, run scandisk, etc.
Reinstalling Win95 (without removing the original windows directory or
formatting) does not solve the problem, but installation goes without a
hitch. I will reformat and reinstall if nothing else works, but I still
suspect hardware problems and the software and desktop installation is a
pain.
Now, here may be a clue for those of you that understand more about
WIN95 than I do:
The machine will boot into protected mode (F8) with no problems at all
and protected mode runs fine with full desktop and so on. This really
has me stumped. Running scandisk shows no problems on the drive.
"Bootlog.txt" is not written to the drive, so I can't go on that.
I have spent way too much time on this machine. Can anyone give me some
more clues as to what to look after. I need to have this thing running
by Wednesday next week and I don't know where to turn next.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Regards,
Bruce
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Bruce Boschek - Haus Christiansruh - Nidda, Germany
[log in to unmask] - CompuServe ID 100331,2566
Using IBM OS/2 Warp Connect and MR/2ice (Registered)
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