# event viewer in win98-2?



## randyrayd (Feb 5, 2003)

Is there an equivalent of NT's event viewer in win98-2?

Emabarrasing, but last night upon booting after cleaning my digital house, I got what appeared to be Safe Mode screen appearance and no mouse. I can't navigate with a keyboard and FREAKED until remembering GoBack. Two revertions later everything is okay, but I'm trying to find out what I did. Bootlog only shows my last one, RegCleaner has no log that I can find (one one action anyway and I remember that) and Norton Cleansweep log doesn't show anything for yesterday. Bootlog only seems to reflect my last boot.

I have a mild CRS affliction and since I did this throughout the day, cannot recall all that was done...Duh!

I did not delete any drivers.

I'm fairly new to this board and although I've had a computer for a while, I am new to the technical aspects. Previously it was "turn it on, it works, I'm good." Your knowledge and my lack thereof is amazing.

Thank you in advance for your assistance and patience pertaining to my posts, past and future, some of which may be questions to another person's post to aid in my learning process. How do you people do the "click here" thing anyway? I have to post a link. 

You can teach an old dog new tricks!

Randall


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

No, not really. There is nothing that will record an error that prevents booting or causes a fatal exception. Although you can try doing a 'logged' boot and examining the bootlog.txt which is produced. You can also try doing a step by step confirmation boot.

Within Windows you could enable DrWatson which does provide some additional info, most of it only useful to the very technically skilled. This only records page faults and gpfs.

You can also enable a feature called the faultlog which logs the invalid page faults and gpfs for later review. TweakUI (http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/tweakui2000.shtml) offers the ability to toggle this feature. There is also a registry tweak that can enable it.

Rather than using GoBack as a first resort in resolving the problem you had, you should have been able to boot to a command prompt and do a scanreg /restore. There are normally 4 previous days backups which are viable. The command prompt is available by tapping the f8 key or pressing ctrl immediately on boot up. The command is:

scanreg /restore

There is a rather long article here, give it time to load, which covers many troubleshooting methods available in 98

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...echNet/prodtechnol/win98/support/troubles.asp

Cleanboot troubleshooting is usually the best approach to narrowing a problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;192926


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## randyrayd (Feb 5, 2003)

Thanks, Rollin Rog. I booted with F5 and got the CMOS/BIOS stuff and backed out before I messed things up further. Remember I'm a novice and my mouse was not functional. I now know I can get to command prompt through start/run. I'm not real comfortable in DOS either and thought I'd give GoBack a try, since I hadn't used it yet.

Thanks for the links. I'll do some reading.

Randall


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

I understand. As for DOS, although you might not know what to do when there, it is really quite safe. You can always exit with a ctrl-alt-del. Usually entering *win* or *exit* will also load windows.

In Win98 there are two basic ways to get to a command prompt that will allow you to do a scanreg /restore. If you cannot boot windows, then pressing and holding the ctrl key immediately on startup gets you to a 'boot menu' with numbered options. The one to choose is the command prompt. You will only have your keyboard so you must 
enter: scanreg /restore and then use the arrow keys to select the registry from the first 4 displayed.

From within Windows, you can also restart in MS-DOS mode. The keyboard could be used to get there if necesssary, using the Windows key (or alt+s), then the arrow keys and enter.


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## randyrayd (Feb 5, 2003)

Thanks again and the technet site is great. I've added it to my personal help folder.

You may get a laugh that when I first got a computer and was playing around and got into MS-DOS, I tried stop, quit, end....a number of things and had to call someone for the exit command.

Randall


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