MS-DOS freezes up on restart from Windows 98 desktop

English Invader

I'm unable to use the native DOS environment at the moment. The DOS screen comes up and when I try to type something no keys register with the system.

The only things I can think of that might have caused this is the installation of DirectX 7 (which to my knowledge was installed with no problems at all) and tinkering with the sound card settings for Doom (which was running through the MS-DOS terminal on the desktop). The game was running fine with what I presume was emulated Soundblaster from the onboard sound and then it suddenly crashed and the system restarted itself. I then figured that I would probably get better results from native DOS and when I went in there I found it wasn't working anymore.

I tried another reset and a reboot to no avail and I'm hoping that there are some diagnostics I can do from the desktop terminal to avoid having to do a fresh install again.

calvinb

Can you boot into DOS from the F8 menu?

BigCJ

Have you tried making a boot diskette?

English Invader

Just tried both of these suggestions and got a fully functional DOS environment in both cases. Thanks very much.

They both seem to be viable workarounds but is there a way I can use them to diagnose and fix the problem in my OP?

SomeGuy

Well, that suggest something bad got loaded in your config.sys or autoexec.bat files. You can use F5/F8 to step through both and test loading or not loading each line. Once you narrow it down, then edit the file and REM out the guilty line.