Cisco, I’m not a computer tech, just a housewife who’s spent time wrassling with her computer. If I were you, at this point I would bite the bullet and just reinstall Win98. I’m assuming you have a System Restore CD that came with your computer? Use it, babe, and never look back.
At this point, your mental health is more important than your game scores.
And this is why you should always make a backup disk of your Favorites file, and print out your e-mail address book every so often.
Amen, sister!
BTW, HANDY–please explain what System Suite 2000 is and does. Never heard of it.
Sorry, I missed the part where you said it was a homemade computer. So you don’t have a System Restore CD? Hmm. http://www.zdnet.com/ has an excellent Tech Forum, if somewhat slow to respond.
As to “what would make it do this”, my #1 reason for having stupid things happen to my computer was always “downloading weird stuff from the Internet”, especially drivers, patches, different versions of QuickTime, etc. It ALWAYS screws up the rest of the carefully balanced circus act that I call a computer. So I don’t do it anymore. Also, I went back to Win95 on the old computer, and we’ve got WinME on the new one. Win98 is totally worthless. And it’s not just me, it’s other people, too.
Also, those “automatic IE updates” that will install themselves without your permission can really screw up Win98. Look under the Tools menu, under Internet Options, under Advanced, there’s a way to tell it not to “automatically check for Internet Explorer updates”.
[sub]yeah, close those barn doors real good now, now that the horse is halfway into the next county…[/sub]
Ah, Preview. Count me in the group of “people who never heard of Suite 2000”, either.
Hi cisco,
If you have a typical Windows 98 installation, you should be able to re-install Windows from the compressed CAB files in your Windows/Options/Cabs directory.
Try booting up in DOS mode and switch to that directory and run the “Setup” program. This will JUST re-install Windows. There’s no hard drive formatting involved.
“ONTRACK Data International, has a suite of programs that help you
maintain your computer in top working order. Included on the CD are
utilities that will let you work within any version of today’s most common
Windows operating systems (95, 98, NT and 2000).”
( more at: http://www.alamopc.org/mag/rev060013.htm)
There are other programs, Nortons for instance that do that too.
I’ve poked my head into this thread occasionally over the past week out of curiosity. As some have already noted The real answer is to re-format and re-install. Once the low level OS binaries get seriously corrupted you’re pretty much screwed and there is the obvious chicken and egg problem with using any “restore” option if the OS won’t boot properly.
If there is critical data on the drive that must be recovered spend 90 bucks or so and get a new 20+ gig hardrive and install the OS on that and set the old drive as a slave and pick off what you need later. With respect to the OS you can install the upgrade as the main OS from the floppy.
Here’s how
Boot to A:
Find “win.com” - It should be in c:\ or c:\windows
rename it “win.zzz” (or whatever)
Re-boot and then try to run setup. As part of the upgrade verification process tt may ask for a win95 install CD or win95 install floppy at some point so have one of these handy.
Note - re-installing windows over a bad existing install does not always fix it as windows does always not copy over all the busted binaries that may be causing the problem. A clean install on a formatted disk is still the best bet.
I’ll throw in my two cents for the reformat at this point…
if you totally feel the need to try and save everything by installing windows ontop of it self you can try a few different things.
when you run the windows setup type in “setup /p f” – that will force windows to rewrite the reg. instead of using the existing one
you can deltree windows in dos, then windows will be gone but all your existing applications will be there. You’ll have to reinstall the apps but the data wont go away
I don’t highly recommend either of these, but if you absolutely cannot loose your data you can give it a shot. if not, find a way to copy the files to a different disk in dos and just wipe the damn thing clean
astro
Geeze, 90 bucks!??
Send it to me FedEx overnight and I’ll send you all the files on a CD for the cost of the blank CD media. Take me a couple hours, assuming I can borrow a Mac that uses internal ATA for its hard drive from IT/Hardware down the hall. (I’m assuming your HD is ATA and not SCSI. SCSI is easier).
Actually, you ought to be able to do this from a PC if your BIOS will boot from a CD and you have a bootable CD on hand with CD-R drivers, + you’re running both a conventional CDROM drive and a CD-R. Boot from CD, burn CDs containing the contents of defunct hard drive, then reformat defunct HD and reinstall everything.
Or just buy a new hard drive, format it, install your OS, put the old HD in as slave. The computer should boot from the new drive but should see the files on the old one. IINAPCU (I am not a PC user) but that seems easiest to me.
:: slaps self :: Sorry, astro, I really must get these glasses fixed. OK, the $90 was for the purchase of a new hard drive, not for recovery of the files on the old one. Therefore Astro was recommending the same thing I ended up recommending. I thought he (Astro) was saying to spend $90 to get the files recovered from the unbootable HD and then in addition to that buy a new hard drive.
:o
Thanks for the info. BTW, Norton SystemWorks 2001 sucks like a raging black hole. Quite possibly, so does McAfee Anti-Virus Shield. My major OS problems cleared up when I dumped both.
I got to this point by deltreeing c:\windows but I didn’t fully deltree it. I let deltree run for about two hours before finally assuming something was wrong and rebooted (I’ve deltreed a whole C drive in about 5 seconds, it shouldn’t take 2 hours for just the windows dir). Now it seems like it wants to let me reinstall windows but I’m getting those “You have interrupted setup” errors and…(this really blows my mind)…deltree seems to have deleted itself so that is no longer an option.
damn…okay go get yourself another hard disk bud, that ones getting wiped.
okay okay…I cant stand sad faces like that
you can try deltreeing the windows directory again…run smartdrv first – that will make it go faster
if not, did you try that setup /p f? I didnt notice if it worked or not if you did try…
um…if not you can go to the windows directory, do a del . to remove that directory competely, and start doing the same to its subdirectories…