Have a HP pavilion comp., Windows 98, 466 mhz processor, 319 Ram, and the CD-rom stopped working. Got an external CD-rewritter backpack. Downloaded the driver from their site. Hooked up the cd-rewriter. It assigned the D letter to it. Restarted. Everything looked great, worked fine. Then installed my son's CD. It installed it, then required direct x and media player to be installed as well (wasn't sure if we had those on there already) so clicked okay. It then said to restart, I did. And now, Windows will not load. I get the logon box, hear the happy little music, see the background image and even a quick flash of the task bar, then nothing. Have tried to start in safe mode, still nothing. Have tried to use the restore points in DOS mode (scanreg/restore), still nothing. Have tried to use the HP recovery CD, won't work. I did notice when I do the ctrl alt delete, the task manager does not show explorer running, only some of the utilities of the antivirus program and something called hidserv. I hope someone can please help me...? So frustrating!
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Jump to PostCan you do Safe Mode?
When the system starts, try tapping either F8 or the Ctrl key, then you should be able to select Safe mode. Let us know if you can get there okay, and your desktop loads.
Jump to PostHidserve is Win98's Human Interface Device Service, not something that should be causing you problems.
What was your son's CD? A CD drive, a program? If it was a program what was it?
Jump to PostYou should start by changing the setting for "Boottime diagnostic screen" to Enabled. That will allow the BIOS POST meassages to display during startup and hopefully give some further clue to what's happening.
I'm also curious about precisely how you tried to use that Recovery CD. The procedure is …
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