Windows Protection Fault at start up after failed DEFRAG

Windows 98 is giving me a windows protection fault at startup. This happened after a DEFRAG failed in the middle - the computer shut down. It will not start windows 98 at all even in safe mode. I have tried everything including restoring the registry. Can someone please give suggestions ?

 

Hi Lsutka, Happy New Year and welcome to TSG.

What is the exact error message you receive?

Have you tried more than one registry restore? And what does it tell you when you try doing it?

 

Hello Lsutka,

Insert your startup disk then power on the machine. Select option to start computer without CDRom support. At the A:\> prompt, type sys c: and press enter. You should get system transferred message. Remove the bootdisk and restart yhe computer. Hope this helps. KW1

 

Happy New Year to you ... mine isn't starting out so great !

Windows safe mode hangs with a blank screen. The regular windows boot says...

Window Protection Fault... you must restart your computer. '

No additional information.

I have tried restoring the registry from previous backups and resetting it according to MS instructions. Neither changed anything.

Any ideas ?

 

Hi,

Tried the system boot disk with sys c: and get same results. Still hangs in safe mode and gives windows protection fault in full windows boot.
I wish it would give a more specific error ! Any ideas.

Thanks.

 

Lsutka,
Found this, might be worth checking out.


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q82710&GSSNB=1

 

Hi,

So far I can't get anything to work. Since this is a laptop I can't use the CD and the diskette drive at the same time. The drivers with the boot diskette don't work with the laptop cd. The pc crashes when the drive is removed. I have no idea what to do now. I can't even re-install windows 98 if the CD doesn't work.

Help !

 

Do you have a Win98 startup disk or just a system disk that came with the computer?

 

I have the win 98 cd and a startup disk that I made.

 

Try this and see if it helps. Although I am not sure it will. Perform a scandisk.
Put the boot floppy in the drive and do not accept CD support. At the A prompt type

scandisk C: press enter

After scandisk is finished, remove the boot floppy and press Ctrl +ALT+Del to restart the computer.

 

Dear Mosaic1,

I did that already. I still can't start windows. I can see everything on the c: drive, but windows won't start.

Thanks for trying.

 

Are you saying you need special drivers for your CD Drive? What make and model is the CD Drive and the laptop?
Have you looked in your BIOS to see if it supports booting from the CD?
If it does, select a boot order so that the CD Boots before the Hard Drive. If you have a full Windows install CD you may be able to boot from it.

 

I looked the bios, it does not support booting from the CD. The laptop is a dell Lattitude. The CD is a Troisan. It says on the CD that if the PC is booted with the diskette drive to use the CD you must re-boot the computer....which doesn't allow me to boot it with the boot disk. I am stuck. What do I do now ?

Thanks for your help.

 

See if you can get scanreg /fix to do anything for you.

Also you might want to test your ram. I know you can't swap out sticks in a notebook, but it remains as a possibility.

You can try the software tester here, just install it to a clean floppy and boot it like a startup disk. Have it do a couple of "burnin" loops before pressing esc.

http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp

Another possiblity which I don't think you've tried, is to do a "step by step" confirmation. Try to determine where it is hanging and skip that step if possible on the next try.

 

Do as ROG suggests.
When you boot to the C prompt, do you first see the generic CD ROM driver Loading? The question is: Do you still have your Config.sys and autoexec.bat?

If you see the This driver is provided by............. Then your config.sys is loading the generic CD driver.
All you would need to do to get CD access would be to load mscdex
If you have your autoexec.bat you can edit it.
Windows Setup Rems out the mscdex line.

You can un rem that and then at the next prompt, type autoexec.bat to load the CD driver. Continue to do a resintall.
However, if you have the ability to use the floppy drive and you have access to another computer, which you do, the easiest thing to do would be to copy autoexec.bat to floppy. Take that to a good computer and open it up in notepad. Edit out the REM -By Windows Setup- before the mscdex line.
Rename the old autoexec.bat to autoexec.ba on the laptop. Copy the edited autoexec.bat to the hard drive.
Restart the computer and see if it loads the CD drive. If so, you can get to the CD and do a reinstall.