Ok here’s the situation, the wife’s computer has win98 French version. Yesterday it starts running really slowly while trying to do anything, and saving documents was painfully slow. So she runs adaware and spybot but finds no relief. Next an attempted reboot ends with the computer starting to do a scandisk and freezes she had left it for an hourand there were no changes.
Ok, I get a call, so we reboot again and go into safe mode and again it starts doing a scandisk and appears to freeze, however this time it gives me an error that says something like drive cannot read from FAT(I don’t read French). I click ok and I get into safe mode and can play a little open files and run programs but I cannot save anything or copy anything to the hard drive at all, I run some diagnostics and everything appears fine. Ok after scratching top of head for a few minutes I think let’s at least try restarting. No problems starts loading windows goes into scandisk and freezes sits like that again for over an hour. Ok I’ll restart again in safe mode this time I get the same routine but it takes longer going through scandisk and giving me the FAT error. I have gone through this process three times now and each time it takes longer and longer to give me the error and finally get into safe mode and each time I am in safe mode I can read and open files and programs but I cannot get this thing to boot into normal mode (I know it’s a French version and hence no such thing as normal mode but!). I am thinking that the master boot record has been corrupted somehow and I am thinking this is not a partition problem. anyone have any clues? My thought is to try running “fdisk /mbr” but I would really like someoneto confirm this as a good idea before I go doing anything I might regret.