Just did that whole procedure to find a corrupted vid driver in my server.
BTW, the Windoze troubleshooter had a procedure which was effective in
checking for corrupted drivers (Start--Help--click--scroll down to
troubleshooting, Win 98 troubleshooters, Startup and Shutdown).

It suggests going into System Info, and disabling *all* drivers by clicking
on their tabs and clicking the property box: 'disable in this profile;'
restarting and unclicking them one by one--rebooting each time--until the
machine fails to boot. In practice, you can re-enable an easily-remembered
group (three or four in a row) of devices each time, which limits the wasted
reboot time.

Pretty slick...accomplishes the same thing as 'safe mode' and is more
selective. Unfortunately, my video card didn't have the appropriate check
box...but when nothing else worked, I reloaded it's driver, and that did it.

I could have accomplished the same thing by deleting it and using one of the
default Windows drivers, but I skipped that step, since disabling the rest
didn't do the trick...Occam's Razor.

jak

"Ron" wrote in message
.. .
One troubleshooting technique for Windows 98 is to press F8 as the system
is
booting (that is, just after the initial Bios information scrolls up the
screen, but before Windows starts to load.) You may have to keep hitting
the
F8 key, since timing is critical.

You should see a menu with several choices. Select 'Safe Mode', which
loads
Windows without any special drivers. If Windows then loads, the problem
may
be a corrupted or incorrect driver. The display driver would be a good
place to start checking. He'll probably have to get a Windows
knowledgeable
person to help at that point.
-Ron
(email: replace 'abuse' with 'cyberguy3k')


"Charlie Bress" wrote:
A neighbor has a Gateway Celeron based system running WIN98. This box is
about four years old.
When he turns it on it will sometimes shut down before the desk top
appears.
Repeated attempts to start it may meet with success. He just sent me a
note
that this morning it took 6 tries before it finally came up running.

Any suggestions. Power supply is suspect, of course, but what else might
be
telling it to shut down?

Charlie