As of this morning when I tried to turn on my computer, I haven't been able to use it and have had to use someone else's computer (on which I am currently writing this from). This is due to the fact that when I turn on my computer (which is a Dell, with a Windows 98 operating system) it goes as far as the Windows 98 logo screen seen here:
http://ecdlweb.uw.hu/w98-startup.gif, then beeps once and doesn't do anything more. The blue bar goes across the bottom of the logo screen over and over again, but an hour later that screen will still be there. The only way to get out of it is to click esc, which takes me to a garbled, pixelated glitch screen which does nothing, and also does not lead anywhere on its own. The only option at that point is to either manually shut off the computer or press ctrl alt delete to restart, where the cycle starts over again.
The only thing out of the ordinary that's happened was several brief power outages last night, due to a storm in the area. My computer is plugged into a surge protector, and after the power came back on, after restarting the surge protector, the computer turned on fine; it's just this morning that I turned it on and it won't load.
I tried restarting countless times, as well as turning the computer off completely, restarting the surge protector it's plugged into, and turning it back on, but nothing has worked.
It WILL load safe mode, but unfortunately for some reason Safe Mode has never been able to recognize my mouse and thus I can't move my cursor at all which makes operating the computer in safe mode difficult if not impossible.
Another thing I tried was clicking F8 before it got to the Windows 98 Logo screen, then choosing Step-By-Step Confirmation from the menu. When I did this, I clicked Y (for yes) after all the steps it asked me to say yes or no for, until after clicking Y for one of them, the computer made the same beep noise and the next step it asked me about was just random garbled computer gibberish symbols, with the same yes or no question at the end of the line. When I clicked Y for that one, about 10 more lines of gibberish appeared in rapid succession, each saying "bad command or file name" after them, with the last line being a longer line of gibberish symbols. When I clicked Y after the last one, nothing happened. When I pressed esc nothing happened. No other keys had any effect either. The only thing I could do was press ctrl alt delete, and it restarted. I tried the step-by-step confirmation again, except clicking escape on the gibberish line and the same thing happened. I tried again, clicking escape on the last regular line before the gibberish one and the gibberish one still came up, followed by the others when either Y or esc was clicked. The last regular line before the gibberish line is:
C:\>SET SBPCI=C:\SBPCI
SET SBPCI=C:\SBPCI [Enter=Y Esc=N]?
I tried restarting again, except this time choosing Command Prompt Only from the menu, and it automatically went through all the lines until it came to the 10 or so gibberish ones, ending at the same line the step-by-step confirmation ended at, and did the beep noise over and over again nonstop until I clicked ctrl alt delete and it restarted once again.
I'm really out of ideas now, but it's very important that I'm able to get onto my computer again and have it functioning, so any help on this matter would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks in advance for any help,
-Alec
