Page 1 of Help - PC Wont Boot

I have a 7 year old Pentium II 650 machine running Win 98 SE which recently refuses to boot up.

It runs the initial mem test OK, and seems to detect the hard drive, CDRW etc, but stalls at the windows start up page.

After an age it will enter the screen allowing you to select normal / safe modew etc, it then takes an age to go anywhere, hanging on a black screen with the message

While initialising device VK_

or

While initialising device VKD
Windows protec(tion error?)

It worked OK yesterday so I have tried entering command line and using scanreg /restore but only get a blue screen with no restore points.

Anybody have any ideas, is it hardware or would a reinstall suffice?

if it`s getting to the windows startup page, i`d hazard a guess that it`s software, but that could mean it`s a virus or a dodgy driver etc etc etc (& at the end of all that it could still be hardware i just reckon software is more likely ) i`d try re-installing win98 back over the top of the current installation, then take it from there, if it disne work we`ll start ticking off boxes till we suss it out ;)

out of interest which virus solution do you use & was it up to date ?

Thanks Ogster,

AVG Personal - I think it was up to date (Ive handed this over to my son though its in the living room so we can monitor useage, but im sure it updated AVG fairly recently).

Hard drive doesnt seem to whirr like it used too, but Ill try to restore the factory settings.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 19th July 2005, 17:38

Try this:-

Switch off your PC, unplug the keyboard and plug it back in and reboot. See if it works.

I will try that now and post back.

Edit - Unfortunately this hasnt helped - Looks like a reformat is required.

This item was edited on Wednesday, 20th July 2005, 09:17

Thanks for the advice.

Restoring to original condition appears to have worked, now I just need a week to reinstall drivers etc!!!