MS-DOS freezes up on restart from Windows 98 desktop

edited March 2017 in Software
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.

Comments

  • Can you boot into DOS from the F8 menu?
  • Have you tried making a boot diskette?
  • 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?
  • 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.
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