Win 98 re-install problem

[bobby46]

I just fired up my old, forgotten win98FE pc. I wanted to donate it to charity but find it now has bootup problems. I want to see and possibly recover what is on it before wiping the drive. Booting gets past the windows splash screen, then tries to load a driver for the monitor I just mated to it, then all stopped saying: couldn't read from drive C:

I inserted my startup diskette and ran scandisk. It found 2meg of corrupted data that I converted to files. Then, I tried to install win98se upgrade cd. I got an error message saying "this program requires windows". Then, I went and got an unused oem win98se cd that reads: "for pc's without an operating system". When I try to setup this version, I get an error message that says this pc already has an operating system installed. This pc is apparently in windows limbo. I would like to remove windows from drive c: at the DOS prompt, to get the oem setup to load, but need to know what needs to be removed. I tried (after startup diskette boot) to run the file "uninst.exe" that is located in the windows folder, but get the error message: this program cannot be run from within DOS. Should I just delete the entire windows folder?

I know I could pull the HDD and slave it on my new pc to recover data. I also could, within DOS, move individual data files to the floppy drive, but that could take a long time. Re-installing windows would be a lot easier, if possible. Any ideas how?

[bobby46]

Everytime I had tried to get to safe mode with f8 key, it went right to surface scan and froze at 71%. Instead of again doing ctl-alt-del to give up, this time I hit escape before surface scan froze, and got to a safe mode desktop!

Sorry if I wasted anyones time!

[glc]

You may want to rethink donating it as is - it sounds like the hard drive has bad sectors.