ms moore,
Glad you got it to boot. I see you're A+, which is probably a good thing if you're running Win98.
Getting back to your question. I've never personally experienced a resource conflict going back to about 25 DOS workstations back in the old days plus all the subsequent upgrades plus friends' computers. Resource conflicts are rare.
Resource sharing is extremely common and necessary because the number of IRQs available for hardware is limited.
From what I remember, System Information\Conflicts/Sharing simply displays shared or conflicting resources without differentiating between the 2.
To find a conflicting device or devices, you'd look for the little yellow or red symbols on hardware items in Device Manager, matching that list against the list in System Information\Conflicts/Sharing. You should check Device Manager. If Device Manager looks fine, then you can pretty much conclude that anything showing in System Information\Conflicts/Sharing is shared successfully, and not in conflict; at least not at the level Windows can see.
Since your list comes up in the BIOS, these are what I see as possibilities, but take this with a grain of salt. All my knowledge is based on experience. With your A+, you probably know more than I do.
This may be simply a list of shared resources.
It may reflect a more basic resource sharing or conflict at the BIOS level that Windows doesn't see.
One thing you can do in the BIOS. Windows 98 (a plug and play OS) and Windows NT (NOT a plug and play OS) were in the market at the same time. I remember BIOSs at that time having a setting "Plug and Play OS?" with 2 settings: Yes and No. Yours should be Yes. Check for that in your BIOS. Essentially, a setting of Yes passes resource management along to Windows to manage the resources. If the present setting is No, then change it to Yes. Check Device Manager again after you do this.
Being that you're running Windows 98, I'm leaning toward that as the culprit, especially since it finally booted.
I would suggest running Scandisk. This is from memory, so hopefully all the terminology is correct. You'll need to run this in safe mode on 98, and turn off any screensaver. Go through all the settings it offers, and tell it to fix everything it runs across, and to do a surface scan. It will take a long time to run, several hours. Every time Windows writes or reads from the hard drive (normal for some of that to happen), Scandisk will restart. Eventually a message will pop up that says something to the effect of Scandisk has restarted 10 times. Do you want to continue receiving this warning? Tell it NO. Then it will keep plugging along until it's finally finished. Good thing to do overnight, and when you get up, it might be finished, depending on system resources, speed, and the size of the hard drive. Scandisk is like a mini-OS repair tool, and with the surface scan enabled, it will also check for any bad sectors on the hard drive and try to move data off them to good sectors. It will also mark those sectors as bad so nothing new gets written to them in the future.
When it's all done, it will display the results. Also there will be a scandisk.log file, I believe at the root of C: that will summarize the results. If scandisk found a lot of bytes in bad sectors, it's either time to replace the hard drive or at least to make a record of the number of bad sectors and run scandisk frequently. If you see the number of bad sectors increasing with subsequent runs of scandisk, it's time to replace the hard drive. In normal times when everything's working OK, you should run Scandisk every 3 months or so as routine maintenance.
Then run defrag, also in safe mode with the screensaver turned off. Again, check the settings, and enable everything. Depending on how long it's been since your last defrag, it might only take a few minutes, or it might need a couple of hours. Run Defrag every week as routine maintenance.
Here are some resources that may help answer the basic question you asked:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184075#appliesto http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/archive/windows98/98w18/98w18.asp&guid= http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/98troubleshooting.html Keep us posted on your progress please.
Pat
