Heal Thyself, PC

Really sick PC?
You've uninstalled or changed something and now, all of a sudden, your PC running Windows 95 or 98 has started displaying horrible error messages every time it starts up? Here are a few things that can help you nudge it back toward the land of the living.

If your PC won't boot
First, try holding down the F8 key at startup time until the "Startup Options" screen appears. (You can then let go.) Choose "Safe mode." If the PC successfully boots to the Windows Desktop, you know that it is a device driver -- probably the one you changed just before the problems began -- that is at fault. Open up the System control panel, click on the Device Manager tab, delete the offending driver or change settings and restart. In this case, you can be reasonably sure that the essential Windows System files are not the fundamental cause of the problem. It is likely that a device driver, VXD or DLL is the cause of your startup crash.

If you can reach the Windows Desktop by starting with or without the F8 Key down, but you encounter an error dialog in "Windows mode" that causes Explorer (the Windows desktop shell) to crash, you should type msconfig and click on the Startup tab. With it, disable unnecessary startup extensions and restart. You might try using msconfig to turn off half the items at a time, then restart as many times as necessary, turning on and off half the items at a time to minimize the number of restarts you'll have to perform.

If you're running Windows 98, Windows 98 SE or Windows Me, you can take advantage of a little-known utility called SCANREG to recover from many serious problems. To use it, boot from a Windows 98 startup disk and, at the command prompt, type scanreg/restore

Choose the date to which you want to restore. You can also fix some registry problems with the command scanreg/fix

Recovery Console
A more powerful recovery capability is found in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a feature called the Recovery Console. To use it, boot from the windows CD and launch it when prompted. It's best to have another computer handy -- the steps required to hard load a previously set system restore point are fairly complicated. Unlike the standard Windows XP System Restore feature (which you should certainly try to access first), Recovery Console can be used -- usually successfully! -- even if the system completely fails to boot. Charlie White published a lengthy tutorial on the procedure, in a four-part article entitled Windows XP Crashed? Here's Help. It's worth printing a copy out and filing it along with your antivirus rescue disks and other emergency tools. Hopefully, you'll never need them!

If your PC gives error messages on a text screen during the boot process
Warning: the solution that follows is not without risk, so be forewarned. It could make things worse than they already are, or disable your machine entirely. However, it fixed my problem.

Step 1: have an emergency floppy disk with the drivers necessary to reinstall Windows in case of a disaster! Windows 98's Startup Disk option in Add/Remove Programs will make this disk with all the needed CD drivers automatically.

Step 2(optional): in the Start Menu's run dialog, type "msconfig" (without the quotes).

Step 3 (optional): on the various pages of the dialog that subsequently appears, examine all of the Autoexec.bat, Config.sys, Win.ini and System.ini files for all of the file names that you listed as causing error messages. (In my case, NONE of the files that caused error messages were found in this search, so this is just a good housekeeping step.) If necessary, delete or disable the offending lines with REM in the first 2 cases (Autoexec.bat, Config.sys), or ";" at the beginning of the line in the last two cases. If you make changes, restart and continue with step 4 if necessary.

Step 4: in the Start Menu's run dialog, type "regedit" (without the quotes).

Step 5: press F3, which invokes RegEdit's Search function. One at a time, search for the exact name of the error-causing files that appear on your startup screen (for example):

jrt3230.dll
pr3230.dll
BATMETER.DLL

Delete these files in RegEdit by selecting the entry and pressing delete. Be very careful not to delete or change other items!

Step 6: If you make changes, quit RegEdit, restart the computer and look for improvements. Continue at step 4 again if necessary.

If anything goes horribly awry, reinstall Windows to a different directory (e.g., C:\Win instead of C:\Windows)

Good luck!

If you've forgotten your Windows XP password
Boot into safe mode (press F8 at startup), then click on the Administrator account at the Windows Welcome screen. From here, go to the User Accounts control panel, where you can remove or change the forgotten password.

Display Driver Problems:
Most display driver problems have nothing to do with the monitor, unless the screen shows an image that looks like it lacks horizontal sync, possibly showing several fractured copies of your mouse pointer, dialog boxes and the windows desktop in a nearly illegible display. In this case, you need to restart in safe mode (see above), and using the Display adapter's Advanced settings, set the refresh rate to a low value -- say, 60Hz.

More commonly, a display driver problem is caused by an IRQ conflict or other issue that may be resolved by deleting and reinstalling the display driver. First, uninstall the old drivers. There should be an entry in the Add/Remove control panel, or in a worst-case scenario, just open the System control panel's Device Manager, look for the adapter setting under Display Adapters (which will probably have a big yellow error icon next to it), delete it, and then restart. Ideally, you should have downloaded the manufacturer's latest drivers for your specific graphics card and have them already present on your system at this point.

Severely trashed hard drive
If the drive is in the FAT or FAT32 format, the most effective solution I've found is the now-discontinued (but widely available) Lost&Found from PowerQuest. Versions 1.03 and older releases seem to do a better job than newer versions, for some reason. I've had the best results from v1.01, which has on several occasions, recovered data that v1.06 of the same program can't retrieve. Weird.

For recovering data from trashed NTFS hard drives, I've found Knoppix to do a good job.

Post-reinstallation Problems:
If you've reinstalled Windows 95 and all of a sudden you can't drag icons anymore, you're not alone. This problem occurs when the OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) functions on your PC get messed up and is typically caused by not uninstalling Internet Explorer 4 before reinstalling Windows. You can fix it by installing the w95ole32update. (This update is not intended for Win95B, Win95C or Win98.)

Pirated XP key problems:
If someone has been naughty and used one of a small number of widely pirated keys to install Windows XP, you might find that Windows will fail to start up after installing Windows XP Service Pack 1 or certain other updates. A program called Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder v1.41 can show you the current installation key and help you change it to a new, legal one.

Mysterious, Random Crashes:
If your problem is random and mysterious, for example a computer that reboots itself "whenever it feels like it," your problem may be hardware related, or you may be infected with a virus. To check for the latter, download and install the free edition of AVG from Grisoft.com or a similar, up-to-date antivirus package for the operating system you are running.

Semi-random, hardware-related failures are typically caused by a weak power supply, an overclocked processor or a system component that is receiving insufficient voltage or running too hot for some other reason. Perhaps your CPU has suffered from "electromigration" (see the article on the subject at http://www.overclockers.com/tips30/) and is nearing the end of its life, or perhaps power line fluctuations are causing instabilities.

Alternatively, it could be caused by a software problem that is causing a crash and reset. Reinstalling Windows to a new directory (e.g., C:\Win instead of C:\Windows) would be a Draconian, but definitive, way to test that possibility. A better bet is to boot your system with a "live CD" Linux distribution, such as Knoppix or MandrakeMove, to see if the instability clears up when Windows is taken out of the picture. These "boot-from-CD" Linux distros can help you back up data, connect to a network, perform emergency disk repairs or even burn a CD in a pinch, too.

For Further Info:

Troubleshooting Windows 98

IT Library

The Techno Zone

User Account

Heal Thyself, PC

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