Press <Del> to Resume

[jduggan501]

Approximately two weeks ago I installed the 1996 version of Compton's Reference Collection. During the install process I was asked to select an audio driver. I accepted the default that was highlighted by the installation process (I forget which one it was now) and completed the installation. When I rebooted my system made a number of thunking noises, did an automatic "CHKDSK", placed some verbiage on the screen that scrolled by too quick for me to read, and then completed the bootup.I ran the program under the compatibility version for Win95 and everything seemed to run OK. The next morning when I started my system it did not complete the boot, but instead stopped and displayed a black screen, with the initial bootup steps displayed, and on the bottom line was the phrase: "Press <Del> to Resume" without the quotation marks. I hit the del key and the system completed the boot. Everything ran fine then, and does so now. I was however annoyed by the necessity to hit the del key every time I did a warm or cold boot, so I checked some of the relevant news groups but could find very little on the issue. One item that was repeated in a couple of messages is that when this happens the drive is about to die.My system is a Dell P111 with a 1Ghz CPU, 512MB ram, (1) 60GB Maxtor (My C: Drive) and (1) 75GB IBM drive. Drive c: is formated as NTFS and the D; drive is FAT32. I'm running WinXP Pro with SP1 and all critical updates installed. It is an excellent system and runs like a dream with this one exception.I contacted Dell by email and they were no help. They told me to try reformating the drive and reinstalling everything less the Compton's Reference. I ignored that advice and downloaded their diagnostic program for my system and the latest BIOS update. I then did a Flash BIOS update to A11, restored the factory default settings with the F9 key in BIOS setup, and cleared the event log there. Next I ran the diagnostic program. After running for about an hour and a half, I was informed that my C: drive had failed two critical tests and that I should backup everything and install a new drive right away. That was over a week ago.I uninstalled Compton's and removed the following lines from my win.ini file:[CRC96]PATH=C:\CRC96\ ;Added PATH=C:\CRC96\ by Compton's Reference Collection 4.0 SetupI also unistalled Blasterball 2, which messes with my video display on exit. By the way my video card is an ATI 7500 All In Wonder with 64MB ram.Yesterday I went out and bought a new Maxtor 80GB drive for just $79.00 after all rebates are refunded. I still cannot believe my C: is ready to die, (everything runs just too darn good with that one annoying exception) so I am going to wait until after I get some affirmation that it is indeed ready to go, from this fourm. I do have most of my data backed up with Norton Ghost 2003, but that is 2 1/2 hour reinstall process. I don't want to got through that unless I really have to.Any and all help will be very much appreciated.

Edited May 14, 2003 by jduggan501

[GolfProRM]

There's an edit button at the top of each of your posts (on the right) that would allow you to fix it if you want to