windows 98 dead
 

my friend is running 98 (big mistake to start with) and now something's broken, the Windoze CD won't repair the operating system and all I'm really left with is command line access. His data is very precious to him so I don't want to try a new install, just in case.

So I was gonna take his hard disc out, copy out all the stuff to mine and then try the reinstall process - just in case.

does that sound reasonable? if not, help! thanks

Sure it does.

Hehehe, you can't repair 98, you can only reinstall. Depends on if the drive is dying or not, or if you have bad memory etc. What's happening that keeps dumping you into safe mode ?

Sure, image the disk, then reinstall over the top. Maybe with Win2k or XP ;)

ok, first he said the system.ini file had gone, then he ran a program called scanregw is it? when booting from the hard disc it didn't even have a command path, when booting with CDROM support I did get commands back, but trying (naively) to go into the windows directory and type win told me it was the wrong version of DOS

so I know a little about PCs but I'm confused... give me embedded systems anyday :(

in fact what happens if you try to boot from C: is it does a DMI (?) check and freezes ... only gets past this if you use a boot disk (or boot using win CD)

hardware seems fine (apart from the keyboard GRRRR)

thanks dude, fingers crossed eh?

You can always try knoppix to recover the data. Or, like you said, rip the drive out and plug it into your box to recover. Then, yeah, blast it and install something else.

Copy the data from his drive to yours. Then try and install Win98 over the top without a format. If it is successful, your friend won't have to reinstall all his apps as the registry will remain in tact.

If that doesn't work, then you can full format and reinstall.

I have reinstalled my 98-SE several times to get it running right again...once I deleted windows and reinstalled it---what I did not realize was that it also took out part of my program files, and a bunch of digital pictures....

--then I found some freeware and recovered a lot of the pictures that were missing.....

have you tried using a bootable start disk to get it going again??

I'm a huge fan of Norton Ghost. I'd say, ghost (image) the disk to another drive, unplug the original, and do whatever you want to the copy. Reinstall, repair, experiment, etc. on the copy. Then worst case scenario, is that you would just plug the old, broke HDD back in. It wouldn't be fixed at that point, but at least you won't be worse off...

Knoppix is also key in many ways, and one of them is data recovery if you don't have many choices :D