Darn,  I made one typo that makes the following look like
there is more than one hard drive, or that the system
might be multi-boot. It is neither...
Sorry for the typo.     Rick Glazier

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 9:45 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Odd boot.


> (Sorry for the length.)
> I had an odd boot last night on a friends computer.
> We had an ATI video driver install fail on an HP
> Pavilion 8380.  (PII-400, I think)
> (We got the exact file for this model from HP since it
> is an ATI MB chip video.)
> We hoped to go from 5.0~ to 5.3 or something...
> (So it was an actual upgrade...) The file at the ATI
> site was specifically NOT recommended by HP.)
>
> While booting, the W98 start-up screen graphic,
> (real mode video),  never transitioned to protected
> mode, or the desktop.  It stopped half way.
> After hitting ESC twice, slowly, and hearing Win98 load
> complete with system sounds and everything, all I was
> looking at was a "C" prompt.
> I could tell Win98 was running because I could navigate
> with the key board and get the proper system event sounds.
> After "playing" this way slightly, (blind), I did a keyboard
> shut down with the Windows key (and a few others).
> The system exited "just like" the GUI was there, complete
> with the proper event sounds...  (Normal ATX type power
> down and no scandisk on re-boot...)
> Selecting the old drives in safe mode caused more of the
> same.
> I forced safe mode and deleted the monitors and
> graphic adapter cards and eventually all was well.
> (It found and installed the exact driver I had tried to put
> back - the original one from before this all started.
> If I had not seen it, I would never have believed all this.
>
> While in safe mode, I noticed the computer thinks it had
> 11 CD-Rom drives. (Some are dups., but there are about
> five different brand names listed.)
> All it has _ever_ had was ONE DVD drive.
> (No one had really touched this system since it came out
> of the box...)
>
> Both Control Panel and "MS Plus" have trouble changing
> the DeskTop schemes.
>
> So the question becomes, (finally the question you say,
> if you got this far...),
>
> Is the registry "going south"?
> If a video driver will not install, what do you do to "clean up"
> the system "just enough" to get it to?
>
> Not an easy question I know, but still hoping for an easy
> answer...
>
> PS: All temp directories and the ATI directory are empty.
> It is running on ATI/MS drivers.
>
>         Rick Glazier
>
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