win98 probs

[mcslack]

hello, any help would be most appreciated. i'm trying to help a friend who has a 3 year old pc preloaded w/win98. no problems until now.

it started with this error:
registry repair results

windows found an error in your system files and was unable to fix the problem. try deleting some files to free up disk space on your windows drive. if that doesn't work then you will need to install windows to a new directory.

then it went to blue screen wih a VFAT error, device not found or recognized, system halted.

so i reinstalled win98 but he lost all of his preloaded software and would like to keep it. so i uninstalled the win98 i just put on and went on to discover that his config.sys file was blank and he had no ifshlp.sys file. i tried extracting them from the CD via Microsoft's instructions (knowledge base) but didn't get very far. i'm lacking DOS skills for sure and i could not extract anything. so i copied the 2 files to disk from a working machine, transferred them to the HD, rebooted. it came up with the first registry error and now it works, sort of.

it looks like something chewed through his HD. i'm missing a lot of files and drivers. any directory i open displays the variable name %THISDIRECTORYSNAME%. i tried to open notepad and i'm missing notepad.exe. i can't really open anything.

so i guess i have a few questions. would it be possible to extract all CAB files from the install CD? would i be wasting my time, 'cuz i'm thinking virus? should i just tell him we should run FDISK, re-install, and he'll have to start accumulating the programs he once had?

many thanks to the patient/ curious people who made it all the way to the end of this small book.

mike

[GaryRouth]

Hi mike

If your friend has a Recovery Disk set, you should be able to boot to it, it will offer to reformat the drive (which will remove any viruses that might be there) and reinstall everything back to the condition it was in when it arrived from the factory = operating system & bundled software. This will work best if no hardware has been changed. If a video card, sound card, modem, etc. has been added since, see if you can replace the original while running the restore. Also, unplug any scanners or printers - you can reinstall them later.

But before you bother with all that, download and run the disk diagnostics from the manufacturer's website for that hard drive. The download will help you create a bootable floppy, and the diagnostics will run from the floppy (you'll need to enter Bios Setup and switch to having the floppy as the 1st boot device in the Boot Order menu). The hard drive might be failing.

Hopefully your friend has made backups of any data he wishes to keep (you'll want to scan any such backups for viruses before putting them back into the freshly restored computer).

Best of luck
. . . Gary

[mcslack]

thanks Gary,

i'll give the diagnostics for the HD a shot. he has no recovery disks, no backups, but i suspect he will start doing these things in the future. . .

if the HD is ok i think i'm going to reformat it and do a clean install as i don't see any way of recovering his data.

mike

[GaryRouth]

Good luck mike -

Does he really have no copy of his programs at all? Ouch. That can be a major investment. If the drive is OK mechanically, it's a fair chance that he got a virus, especially if he didn't have any antivirus installed - and if he has no recovery disks, no program disks, and no backups, I'm thinking he likely didn't see the need for antivirus either.

Hope it turns out OK
. . . Gary