[fishchowder]

I have a laptop and it's a Toshiba Satelite Pro 225CDS. It's very old.. it has Windows 98 SE on it.
Everything was working fine, (well as 'fine' as it ever has been, at least) until last night.
It's extremely slow and currently hooked up to my superfast Optimum Online cable modem through USB and has been for a while. Internet Explorer has never worked so well, so I tried to disable FLASH, because whenever I went on a site where the flash plugin was present, IE had an error and needed to be shut down.

What I did first was, I went to this site and did as it said to disable the plugin temporarily to see if it would make IE work any faster. This is what the instructions said and I did it:

Click Start, Run, type regedit

Go to following dir:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\

Click Edit, New.. Key

Name New Key:
{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}

Now create new DWORD value inside this key.

Rename this DWORD value to "Compatibility Flags"

Set Value Data to 400 and Base to Hexadecimal.

This seems complicated but you will see along the way it make's much more sense.

If you want to disable flash correctly without compromising performance this is the way. To enable flash simply delete the key.

I did that, and tried it again, and still Internet Explorer was still 'encountering errors' everywhere.

Now, there was once a time when at least it would let me search google and such without shutting off and stuff.
Recently, a few months ago, I downloaded and installed IE version 6, to get a Messenger program to run. It was one of those all-in-one messenger services since I wanted MSN messenger but the actual program took up way too much RAM and space in general for it to work on my craptop.

So my friend told me to go to Add/Remove programs, and remove IE 6. I did so and it asked if I wanted to go to the older version of IE and I clicked yes.

It ran its uninstall process with quite a few errors saying a few files could not be replaced or something..I can't exactly remember. I clicked OK to them all and chose not to abort the process. When it was complete, it instructed me to restart my laptop and I did.

Since then I have not been able to start it.

When I try and start it regularily, after it goes to the "Windows 98" screen, it shows a black screen and it freezes like that for quite some time.

When I use Safe Mode, it brings me to a blue error screen that says:

Fatal Exception OE 0167:00000015
(edit:: i just tried safe mode again and this time it said "0167:00000013")

I can't start my laptop at ALL.

Is there any hope for this??

Edited by fishchowder, 09 October 2007 - 06:01 PM.

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Hello fishchowder,

Unfortunately when you uninstalled IE6 and got all those failures, your Operating System got corrupted. In short you need to reinstall. Unfortunately Windows 98 to my recollection does not include a repair install. The good news however is Windows 98 doe not necessary format your hard drive. I have found a link below on how you can reinstall without loosing your data.

http://pcworld.about...156id111652.htm

[anzenketh]

Hello fishchowder,

Unfortunately when you uninstalled IE6 and got all those failures, your Operating System got corrupted. In short you need to reinstall. Unfortunately Windows 98 to my recollection does not include a repair install. The good news however is Windows 98 doe not necessary format your hard drive. I have found a link below on how you can reinstall without loosing your data.

http://pcworld.about...156id111652.htm

[fishchowder]

Hello fishchowder,

Unfortunately when you uninstalled IE6 and got all those failures, your Operating System got corrupted. In short you need to reinstall. Unfortunately Windows 98 to my recollection does not include a repair install. The good news however is Windows 98 doe not necessary format your hard drive. I have found a link below on how you can reinstall without loosing your data.

http://pcworld.about...156id111652.htm

One problem ... my laptop does not have a CD-ROM drive. Only a floppy drive. Is this hopeless?

edit: it also has a flash drive installed. can i copy needed files onto there?

Edited by fishchowder, 14 October 2007 - 08:42 PM.

[wannabe1]

Hi fishchowder...

You'll need a boot floppy to do this. If you do not have a Win98 Startup disk, download this Win98SE Startup Disk and save the file to your desktop. Double click the downloaded file and put a fresh floppy diskette in the drive when prompted to do so. This will create a disk we can boot the broken machine with.

Then go to the Microsoft website and download Internet Explorer 6...save it to removable media or the flash drive. If we get the machine to start, install this immediately afterward,

With the Win98 Startup disk in the floppy drive of the broken machine, power it on...it should boot to a screen with options listed...press Shift + F5 at this screen to open a command session. When you see the command prompt (A:\), type C:\windows\command\scanreg /restore and press "Enter". (Note the space in the command line after scanreg.)

The result of this will be a list of restore files...use the arrow keys to select the third one from the top of the list and press "Enter". This will restore your registry to a saved version and may allow your machine to start normally. Don't forget to remove the startup disk before you reboot. If the machine doesn't reboot on its own, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to start the process.

wannabe1

[fishchowder]

Hi fishchowder...

You'll need a boot floppy to do this. If you do not have a Win98 Startup disk, download this Win98SE Startup Disk and save the file to your desktop. Double click the downloaded file and put a fresh floppy diskette in the drive when prompted to do so. This will create a disk we can boot the broken machine with.

Then go to the Microsoft website and download Internet Explorer 6...save it to removable media or the flash drive. If we get the machine to start, install this immediately afterward,

With the Win98 Startup disk in the floppy drive of the broken machine, power it on...it should boot to a screen with options listed...press Shift + F5 at this screen to open a command session. When you see the command prompt (A:\), type C:\windows\command\scanreg /restore and press "Enter". (Note the space in the command line after scanreg.)

The result of this will be a list of restore files...use the arrow keys to select the third one from the top of the list and press "Enter". This will restore your registry to a saved version and may allow your machine to start normally. Don't forget to remove the startup disk before you reboot. If the machine doesn't reboot on its own, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to start the process.

wannabe1

I tried that a few times actually, the restore way.
I tried it once more and it doesn't work. After I restore it to a saved version, it reboots and continues to do the same.
When I start it in regular mode, it just freezes on a black screen after the Windows 98 screen, and eventually reboots automatically.
Safe mode just gives me that blue screen of death..

by the way: it doesnt matter if i lose all my info, at this point
i just want it to turn on =/

Edited by fishchowder, 15 October 2007 - 02:38 PM.

[wannabe1]

Sorry for the delay...I didn't know you had replied to this.

Without a cd-rom drive and a Win98 installation cd, this one is going to be pretty hard to get running. At the very least you'll need to copy some files from the cd and, most likely, will have to reinstall the operating system to get it back up and running...either option will require an optical drive.

That said, I have seen Win98 as a floppy set, but I've searched everywhere I can think of and have failed to locate a set of these. If you have the installation cd, you might try using a HDD enclosure for your HDD and install Win98 from another machine. Win98 was not as picky about installation and this technique has worked for me in the past...though it is iffy at best.

[fishchowder]

Sorry for the delay...I didn't know you had replied to this.

Without a cd-rom drive and a Win98 installation cd, this one is going to be pretty hard to get running. At the very least you'll need to copy some files from the cd and, most likely, will have to reinstall the operating system to get it back up and running...either option will require an optical drive.

That said, I have seen Win98 as a floppy set, but I've searched everywhere I can think of and have failed to locate a set of these. If you have the installation cd, you might try using a HDD enclosure for your HDD and install Win98 from another machine. Win98 was not as picky about installation and this technique has worked for me in the past...though it is iffy at best.

Ahh, thanks so much for the reply.
Well, I was thinking about purchasing an external CD-ROM drive, but I'm not sure about the cost and such.
Is there any way I can get it running from copying the needed files to a USB Flash drive?
I'm not sure about the HDD enclosure idea, because I'm not sure what that is or how it works. Is it difficult?

[wannabe1]

One of the problems with working with the older machines is that most of them do not have cd-rom or USB support until the operating system is installed. The Win98 bootdisk provides cd-rom drivers, but not usb drivers.

It may be that you can use the external cd-rom if your BIOS will support USB before the OS is installed...so that's definitely worth a shot.

Installing with the drive in an enclosure will be iffy, but I have seen it work. All of the drivers for the older machines hardware will need to be installed afterwards if it does work.