Leave it to 98se...

[Panama Red]

Had a strange thing happen this past Sunday. Helped a friend put together a new system using some of my spare parts in his sister's old case. We replaced the mobo, hdd, cpu, psu, and memory. Loaded 98se on it and then I managed to mess up the mobo driver installation. The Via 4 in 1's messed everything up and I started getting corrupted dynamic link library warnings and missing .vxd's on startup. Rather than fight with it, I decided to just do a clean reinstall of 98se. No programs were on yet, but I had run the MS security update cd so everything was up to date. Considered an over the top, but decided on full reinstall instead. I booted to the 98 CD and it recognized the already installed system. I opted to replace that installation and the program ran the setup files. I left the room for about 5 minutes and when I returned, it was done loading and all the updates were intact! All the hardware was working correctly in Device Manager and no more warning notices. The display settings were just as I had set them. Kinda has me baffled how I was able to do a repair like you do with XP without asking for it. Didn't even know 98 had that capability. Anyone else ever seen this? Maybe it's something in the updates. Sure has me scratchin' my noggin'!

[Confused]

I did a over the top with 98 like that several times. Lot quicker than XP as 98 seems to just replace corrupted files.
Chas

[Designer]

Yeah, over the top install seems to just get rid of any problems you've got rather than fully re-installing, all the stuff you've already got on there and device drivers remain intact and 98 should automatically detect and use them.