Win 98 System Hangs at Boot

[DaveP57]

I'm posting this for my wife. Her Win98se system is currently hanging during boot up. As breify as possible, heres the particulars:
Noticed windows 98 boot info screen said C Drive possibly infected 1 trojan. Updated virus scanner with numerous patches as wife doesn't keep it updated but it hung up at end of update process, would not scan or close. Managed to close program with windows dialog: this program has performed an illegal operation. Had to leave for work, so I asked her to try to scan for viuses. as I was leaving she tried to scan, scanner froze again, so I told her to use ctrl-alt-del to close the virus scanner. She hit ctrl-alt del twice which rebooted the computer instead of closing the virus scanner. Her system will now not go beyond the boot up screen with the windows logo and clouds. Seems to me the virus scanner which was never properly shut down may be the problem, but I'm just a novice, don't know. I have booted her system to safe mode, and run the command prompt scanreg /restore, and restored a previos registry, problem persists. The computer can now only be booted to safe mode. No internet, no anti spyware scanner, no tools except msconfig. Can I disable the virus scanner in msconfig? It was never set to load at boot, is unchecked in start up tab, always has been, problem persists. I can access downloadable tools and internet from my system but the only transfer media available is the 1.44 mb floppy. Virus Scanner prob? Virus prob? Any ideas? Thanks for any advice!

 

[4Ryan6]

It sounds first of all like your boot record is damaged you can repair your MBR by using your Floppy Bootdisk, to use the Floppy, Set the BIOS to boot from the A drive, Boot the machine from the Win98 Floppy Start Up Disk, when you get to the flashing A:\> prompt, type FDISK /MBR putting a space betweeen FDISK and /MBR, and press Enter, it will erase and rewrite your boot record, that may get you into the machine, normally from that point.




<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP&NoWebContent=1" target="_new">More info on FDISK /MBR</A>




<A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=2541" target="_new">My Rig</A>

 

[DaveP57]

Thanks for you help, 4ryan6! I'm happy to report that the problem has been corrected. I had to un-install the virus scanner in safe mode and that did the trick. Booted into normal mode just fine after that. I'm a hero here at home...at least for a little while. Thanks again.