Windows Booting But Can't See Anything

[Kal]

Went to MSCONFIG startup and unchecked my MS Sidewinder since I rarely use. Now windows boots but after the 98SE splash, screen goes dark but I can hear the sounds of the normal desktop coming up. Went to Safe mode, rechecked MS sidewinder block--no good, Reloaded win 98SE from the D: drive--no good; and ran scan disk to no avail. Please let me know if there's a "painless fix."

[scotter]

boot in safe mode go into system propertys, device manager and see if anything is listed 2 times if so delete them both and then reboot same thing for ! marks and ? marks,
make sure you check under moniters
every now and then mine will double load the moniter drivers and do the same kinda thing /forum/smile.gif

[Axel]

Before taking Scotter's suggestion - make sure you know where all of your driver diskettes are. Also - locate both your windows CD-ROM disk, and write down the entire path to your CAB files(if you copied them to your hard drive)
Then you can start removing things in safe mode.

You mentioned scandisk - tell us - did it complete? were there any errors? have you done a surface scan lately?

Been long since you completed a successful defrag of your hard drive?

Been long since you updated your anti-virus definitions and run a sweep of your system?

Had a computer last week that would come up in safe mode, but would go to a black screen in regular mode. - Two things we noticed, there had never been a successful defrag run on the system in 3 years, and the anti-virus definitions hadn't been updated in 18 months. The hard drive was un-recoverable - might as well expose it to a large magnet and start over. We couldn't even re-install windows.

Hope you aren't having the same problem - tell us of anything else going on in the system (new hardware, new software, just tried to update this driver, etc. etc.) and what kind of computer is it?

[Kal]

Thanks but I'm still having some problems. I keep it defragged and stay up to date (religiously) on the latest virus definations. I got it to come back up by degausing; however, still was having problems but it's continued statement that gckernel.vxd was missing and needed by a program. Finally was able to delete and reinstall the sidewinder getting rid of this error but now have sys.ini damaged files. I'm reloading windows off the c: drive since that was one of the error recommendations. I'm starting to suspsect norton 4.0 utilities may be the culprit. Again, thanks