Problem starting old PC

[jonny dingo]

Problem booting old PC. I have an old PC which the grankids use for games etc. except now it will not start. It boots(?) from IDE-0 and then displays message “Sound Blaster Audio PCI driver cannot load MIDI Waveset. MIDI playback has been disabled”.

Press 'OK' and 'Windows Enter Password' box appears BUT 'Select User Name' is blank and cannot be written in and 'Password' cannot be written in.

Only options are press Cancel or hit Return which leads to white cursor on black screen only. Nothing further is possible. Cntrl+Alt+Del shows no programs running.

The PC initially had Win 98 which I upgraded to Win ME. Although I have the Win ME disk I only have boot disk for Win 98. I can load this and see all(?) the files in C: but don’t know where to go from here. I have tried various setting in Safe Mode; Optimal, Original etc with no effect.

I am familiar with a few DOS commands and happy to play around. Would prefer not to lose data if possible but will try anything - the grankids are getting fractious.

Can someone offer me some advice please.

Jonny

p.s. when I say old its got a 500 Mhz CPU and about 20 Gig of memory.

[Precidia]

more than likely your gonna have to reload it, never could save a 9x/me boot very well, if you do reload it put 98 on it and forget ME, ME caused more problems than it fixed

[jonny dingo]

Weird. Tried everything I could think of. Wouldn't boot in Safe mode - just said 'bypassing startup programs' and then left me with just the A: prompt.

In the end ran edubp.exe. PC threw a few wobblies started to load ME in Safe mode and then said 'virus in boot file' - not true.

After that booted from IDE-0 and came up OK.

Fingers crossed all OK.

Close thread.