# System boot failure



## robwile (Jan 26, 2000)

Cyrix pr233mmx, Asus Mother Bd, Award BIOS, 64M ram, 2 HD's, soundblaster, Creative CDROM, Creative CDR. System starts to boot, passes memory test, recognizes all PnP devices and then hangs just before WIN98 starts. System won't boot from a boot disk either. Note: I don't know if this is related, but previously, I noticed that Outlook Express was slowly increasing in size and taking up over 1 Gig of space! I uninstalled the program and reinstalled. Everything seemed to work fine and then it only took up 4.5 Meg of space and was stable. After about 3 or 4 start ups and shut downs, the above described problem occurred. Could it be an Outlook Express virus that won't let WIN98 load? How can I get my system to boot again?


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## LarryCore (Aug 26, 1999)

Check CMOS (press DEL at boot) and make sure you are set to boot from A,C not C,A - this should allow you to boot from floppy.

A virus won't stop you from booting from a floppy.


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## robwile (Jan 26, 2000)

Thanks for the reply, but I already checked that. It is set for A,C. When I power up with the floppy in A, the drive light flickers and then it goes on and behaves as described above...as if it didn't detect a disk in 'A'. Any other thoughts?


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## phobiussno (Nov 21, 1999)

This may be primitive thinking but do you have any other boot disks to try (EBD from AV perhaps)...Also, before splash screen can you get to the startup menu with the CTRL key so that you can get to a prompt...just curious...


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## HowdyBubba (Dec 9, 1999)

When you say that it stops before it loads Win98 do you mean that it hangs before it reads from the harddrive at all or during the boot process? I had an FIC PA2006 motherboard that would hang after detecting PCI devices but before harddrive inits only if USB was enabled in BIOS. Did you change or enable anything in BIOS before this started?


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