98SE - Refuses to boot after gaming

[Ruler2112]

I've got a weird problem with my PC. It's an AMD 2100+ running 98SE with 512 megs of RAM and a 120 gig hard drive. Everything hums along fine until I play a game. (Diablo 2, Jedi Knight 2, Rune, Unreal - you name it). Nothing immediatly goes wrong, but the next time the computer starts, it'll get to the point that the windoze splash screen disappears and the cursor is under the character in the upper left corner of the screen. The GUI is now supposed to pop load, but instead nothing happens. I restart via the reset switch (Control-Alt-Delete does nothing at this point) and tell windoze to boot normally and everything's fine. It's not a critical problem, but it is annoying. Anybody have any ideas?

[Dax_Brandy]

might be a slightly corrupt registry with some invalid entries.. use system mechanic to clean it.

[Xtreeme]

Regsupreme is also simple to use.

[John Prophet]

youre right, that is weird.

try running "sfc" and use the "scan for altered files" (ignore setupx.dll" if it pops up)

also you can hit f8 during boot to give you the boot menu....and there are 2 things you can do...you can do "step by step" confirmation and try to step thru them and see if you can find which step it hangs at......OR...try the "logged" boot and after it boots go look at the bootlog.txt and see if you find any clues (bring a sandwhich, its a long file)

Does it do it if you try to boot into safe mode? (i dont know what difference it makes, but I feel important asking stuff like that, lol).

JP

[Ruler2112]

I have norton utilities on it (which finds nothing wrong) and it's done it with several different installs, so I don't think it's a corrupt registry.

I have tried booting step-by-step several times and everything's fine until it starts 'loading all windoze drivers' (say no and you go into safe mode, yes and into normal gui) at which point it hangs. I've also done logged boots and it stops at different points every time. It does boot into safe mode without fail though.

The oddest part to me is that I change nothing, don't go into safe mode, don't change any files, don't do anything different, and it'll work on the next boot. (Select normal when the boot menu pops up complaining that windoze didn't finish loading last time.)

Why is it that it seems that I always get the strangest problems known to man, both at home and at work?

[Ruler2112]

OK, I discovered something by accident this weekend that fixes the problem, although is very, very, very weird and I haven't the foggiest as to why it would cause any problems.

I pulled apart an old machine and was planning to wipe the HD. Before I did so, I wanted to pull a ghost image of it so that if something went wrong, I could restore it easily. I put it in my new system and it wouldn't recognize the drive. I thought it might be UDMA because it was a really old drive. So, I disable UDMA in the BIOS and it still wouldn't recognize the drive. At this point, I get frustrated, turn everything off, chuck the HD into the pile of computer stuff in the corner, and go fishing.

That night, I boot up my new system and it starts! Thinking, I realize I had forgotten to re-enable UDMA on my secondary IDE channel. I have a Yamaha 24x burner on that channel and nothing else - I know this drive supports UDMA. Anybody have any ideas as to why this would cause such a symptom?