GabrielKnight123 wrote on 2025-02-20, 04:28:

I used restart to dos from windows 98se and I'm having sound card settings issue so every time I reboot my pc it boots to dos but because I have a sound card error I can't type anything to exit out of dos usually with "exit" is there a shortcut to get back to windows? I can press F8 before dos loads and choose "normal" but it just boots to safe mode

I've not looked at this is years, bit IIRC Win98 starts/runs under DOS - so I'm guessing it never
get as far as actually loading W98, and you have some sort of error in the sound card drivers that
kills it dead enough that it cant proceed?

Have you tried removing the sound card (or disabling in BIOS if built-in) - perhaps if its "not there"
it's drivers will fail in a different (and hopefully less critical) Way...

Also, can you boot DOS from a floppy? Perhaps you can modify CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to
prevent the fatal problem?

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

win

Yes win, but keep in mind this will launch Win98 on the DOS drivers it loaded for its DOS mode restart.

My guess is that the DOS mode restart has overwritten Config/Autoexec and added a COMMAND.COM call at the end of Autoexec to inhibit the boot process from continuing into Win98, those modified files will also contain DOS drivers loading lines.

You should be able to restore those files to the vanilla Win98 backups (maybe they are renamed to *.win or something, I don't know). Then a machine restart should get you back to boot to Win98 as usual.

Thanks all I was able to get back to windows with F8 and choosing command prompt with confirmation I didn't load autoexec.bat and config.sys and it loaded back to windows