win 98 startup problems

you can have a bad cd - drive, bad ram and so on. You will have to track down the bad one, one by one.
Test : memory with memtest86+  at           http://www.memtest.org/
check the cabling of the cd - drive (take it out and put it back after checking)
check the boot screen if all is detected as it should

nobus

Thanks for responding.The memtest.org page is way over my head,I will take some time and read more about it.As far as the cd-drive being bad I think it is more of an issue of being unsupported as I read that mitsumi drives don't always work with dos?The cabling is fine and the boot screen seems to detect everything.The cd I am using is read by another machine so I don"t think that is problem.My son was using a spy/adware program when prblem occured.Deleted something that came up as spyware,hope this narrows problem down a little.Sorry for delay in comment sometimes hard to get to another puter Thanks Zemo

you can also run sfc in the run box

nobus

Sorry, but I don"t know what sfc is,and even if I did I cannot get to the run box.Windows loads to the point of having a desk top but no icons no start button{it flashes for second then disappears}

if you go looking at the mitsumi site, you can find out if they've got dos drivers for your model; you probably did not load any cd driver in dos. BTW, how did you boot into dos?

nobus

As i see your problem, there are 2 options for you : try to repair the windows system on your disk, or backup everything you need, and do a fresh install. And if you post the model of the cd, i could try finding a dos driver for it.

nobus

I did go to the msi site and downloaded mtmcdai.sys added it to my start-up disk and used that to boot to dos,did not help still says cannot read drive.I don't really need to save anything on the hard drive as everything is pretty much backed up on cd's.I tried to reinstall windows with cd-rom support from dos but would not read drive.I would like to repair the windows system but not sure how mto go about it,same with fresh install not sure how to do it without access to cd.The model is MSI c52(ms-8152).The only driver I could find was mtmcdai.sys.At one point when booting up,the screen said I was missing himem.sys and  mtmcdai.sys which I added to start-up disk rebooted and screen did not say I was missing any files but did not help anything else as I still could only get as far as desktop,with no icons.I am fairly new to computers (as you can probably tell)so for fresh install would I have to format disk and if doing so would I be able to reload from cd.I have access to a lg cd/rw drive that I could replace the msi with if that would help dos read the drive???Thanks Zemo