[Kristi]

Long story: I wanted to do maintenance on my computer, so I did disk cleanup, scan disk, and degfragment. By the way this is W98.

Then I wanted to clean out the registry. Here's where things started going wrong. I have used reboot's posted method of cleaning the registry 3 or 4 times with no problem on 2 different computers. I used the "manual" way. Recently, I saw that he had written an automated version using smartdrive. Shopvac is what it was.

During the registry build process of that procedure, something went wrong. I posted a thread in W98 forum and with the help of galaxian I restored the registry.

Now everything was back to normal. BUT, being a stubborn German with a touch of firey Irish, I still wanted to clean the registry. So I did the "manual" way of cleaning, which I never had a problem with before. And previously, the time involved from start to finish was never more than 20 minutes.

This time it went very slow. I knew this was a possibiliity. So after about 6 hours (it was working, just very slowly), I went to bed. Two and a half hours later, I got up to check on the progress. This is where things got REALLY serious. It wasn't even halfway done. Then I SMELLED SOMETHING HOT. I aborted the procedure by shutting off the computer.

After a couple of hours of cooling time, I restarted and restored the registry again. Everything appeared to be normal. I could still smell the "burning", but decided it was just getting rid of the smell that remained in the case.

I thought I should do a thorough scan disk before anything else. The scan was 2/3 or 3/4 done and I got an exception error.

Since then, there has not been a successful restart, and I THINK the burning smell was current and not residual.

So, after this long story, does anyone know if I fried my hard drive?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Kristi