Windows 98 only boots in Safe mode - Error #5 au30dos.com error

[doglover]

Not sure if this is the right discussion group as I have never posted before:

My old computer is Windows 98 and was working fine until after I had
password protected the login. I can't remember if I rebooted after that, but
did a shutdown. Then about a week later I went to boot the computer and it
went into continuous reboot mode. I can successfully boot in to SAFE mode,
but I need to get some data off this machine and onto my new one and can only
use my floppy drive which is not big enough to get most data, obviously. I
don't know if password protecting caused the problem or if it was just a
coincidence.

So I would like to fix this problem and get the machine to boot up properly.
On startup I get:

Error #5 AU30dos.com section not in Au30dos.ini driver not loaded.

I looked in the ini file and there is not a au30dos.com section there. But I
don't know what to put in the file.

Any help would be much appreciated. I was told by Dell the only way to get
my data off the machine was to fix this problem or pull our the hard drive
and put it in my new computer. I'm not really a HW person do I don't really
want to attempt this if I don't have to.

Thanks!
doglover