[derekg]

Ok to lay a lot of what its doing in depth, I looked around in questions before posting, basically its what it says it won't boot up , it's a hp8665c 512 ram(added a yr ago) and the 38 gig hard drive it came with, the problem I am receiving is when I boot the computer up, it will start with the hp blue screen then go to a black screen with blinkiing curser top left, this had happened to me a month ago and the weird thing about it is I did the auto disk clean up then rebooted and it took me to black screen with curser blink top left, but how I fixed this was I put the win98 cd in booted it up ran from cd and re installed over top hoping to fix it and it was successful only losing a few drivers that I had to re install main from my own personal uses like ulead picturing and just minor things so no big deal, the problem I have now is the weirdest thing to me because everything was working 100 perc. I was in the process of finishing a few downloads on limewire and my wireless net froze up on me so I couldn't do anything but pull the plug and plug it back in, I turn the power on and again I get this black screen with curser top left.,. noww when I try do the re install it says windows setup requires 7340032 bytes available on your c: drive, I looked made sure everything was snug in the PC box, tried each ram individually,, and I don't know if this helps but I had a 8 gig drive with win98se that was lyin around also so I unhooked my 38 gig drive and plugged the 8 gig drive in and it booted up just fine so would that mean the motherboarding is OK?not many who post this prob have access to another drive to try so trying to weed out things, I have some very important stuff I need that I don't have another copy of or back up of so I was wondering is it possible to save this stuff and could it be some minor problem that the average computer user such as myself can't figure out, I tried with a 3 and a half floppy disk, and it takes it further than the blinking screen, but I do not know the commands to get it running if it can go further, if there are any suggestions I would greatly apreciate it and hope I narrowed down everything what it has been doing , thank you

[Duane in Japan]

Buy one of these USB adaptors to turn your hard drive into an external hard drive and plug it into a friends PC and get your stuff, on my #2 PC the (#1 HD) external drive is now I & J drive so the boot up stuff on C drive does not come into play, its called I drive now.

[derekg]

Thank you for your reply, is there anything else that can be done to get this computer back up, I hear some say it might be a video card issue? Or missing file/driver? I guess could be anything, I was able to perfom scandisks and found no errors, is it possible to re instal windows even with the message : windows setup requires 7340032 bytes available on your c: drive, or could a boot up disk solve this? Thank you

[derekg]

OK so I got my boot disk, I start comp, f8 will not take me to the normal screen where it shows normal boot, safe mode,command prompt, or safe mode command prompt,. but only a command prompt and step by step confirm displayed at bottom of screen, I did the step by step pressed why for yes for all of them everything said successfully loaded to drive D.(still in black screen all of this), Then after the successful message to drive d it puts a A:> so there I'm stuck,, I try another reboot and it shows the hp blue screen , goes to the blinking curser at top left,, 5 seconds later says preparing to start your computer this may take a few minutes so here I'm thinking it might go, then it says the diagnostic tools were successfully loaded to drive D.then uder that message it gives me another A:\> then I'm stuck what to put in,so I'm a little stuck,thank you again

[derekg]

This also may be helpful for trouble shooting, I found a site called when windows won't boot up because of program/s causing possible conflict, it calls for put boot disk in,, at A: prompt typ dir c: and it should bring up whatever it is that it does, but all I get is a invalid media type reading drive C abort retry or fail( I get this a lot when trying commands) one I haven't gotten wich is new is right after abort retry fail it says Fail on INT 24, thought maybe it might help ,only commands I know of so far that work are autexec.bat / and debug/