Help/windiws 98SE oroblem

[Truckman36]

My son's ssystem p4, 1.6 Asus P4S533 with operating system win 98 Se went down..he's oit of town in Japan for month and trying to help his wife by telephone. The system reboots, scansdisk and goes to the desktop where they have a pic of their two kids as background..no icons, right click on mouse gets nothing, no start button or anything..tried inserting os disk but disk drive won't operate on reboot. went into bios and disabled floppy and HD from booting but then cd rom can't find operating system disk..kinda raw at this, wondering if anyway to restore their info without reinstalling everything..

[bailey]

go into device manager and see if any problems show up there

[Truckman36]

bailey, can't get to the device manager..when screen background pic loads, there are no icons, no start menu, nothing and right clicking mouse won't even load properties, etc. for screen

[bailey]

hold down the f8 key and go into safe mode

[Xaqut]

Hold down f8 key pick comand prompt type scanreg/restore
pic a old...good copy of reg. then reboot

[mike breck]

If that doesn't work, then try reinstalling Windows over the top of itself. Make sure it reinstalls to "C:\Windows".

[Truckman36]

nothing works so far...going to try to reinstall over old system as mike suggested. anything special i need to do or just install like doing a clean install without formatting?

[Truckman36]

Help, please. tried reinstalling windows 98SE .. when finished setup and restarts get the following message - Invalid Media Type Reading Drive D...then with retry, etc, clicked help and said ini file had been deleted .. total loss here..The files are C;Windows, D:applications, Eownloads, F;games, etc///any suggestions?/ My son's computer so unsure what he has in applications

[bailey]

you need to tell it where the w98se cd is when it does that,
the default is D, you need to tell it where they are.

looks like it might be g: or you could even browse for it

[Truckman36]

Bailey, the cd drive is j: - but how do i do that when it says can't read D ? hit retry? Does it give me an option then?

[bailey]

I thought it did
when it can't find the files, it usally lets you browse for them.
maybe I am wrong

[andyms18a]

if you have a win98 boot disk use it to start the computer and at the A: type d: and hit enter then type md win98 and hit enter then put the win98 cd in the cd drive and type K: and hit enter (the reason i picked K: is the boot floppy makes a ram drive so all your hard drives except C: and your cd drives move down a drive letter so D becomes E ) then type copy win98*.* D:\win98 when it finishes type D: and hit enter then type cd win98 and hit enter then type setup and hit enter as the setup file are now on the hard drive you wont knead the win98 cd so it shode install ok