Bear with me…
Yesterday, I was giving my home computer an overhaul: removing spyware, adware, and carefully removing/deleting programs I didn’t really need, and generally optimizing its speed and performance. I had already run my McAfee Virus Protection program and came up with no viruses… It seemed to work fine. I then set up scandisk to check for surface errors and do automatic repairs. I had to try about six times before scandisk would do more than 1,000 or so clusters… I had to COMPLETELY shut off all other programs, shut off the quick launch toolbar and run scandisk in safe mode from msconfig. Also, I completely removed McAfee because some of its components kept turning on during start up and I wasn’t sure if that was the problem.
8 hours(!) into scandisk’s scan of my 60gig drive-- about halfway through – with seemingly no problems, I went out for about 6 hours. When I returned home, my computer had a message that it could not find my harddrive. I noticed then that my stereo – which is hooked up to my computer – was blinking. I now suspect a power outage occurred while I was out. (But hey, maybe not.)
I was initially able to restart using my Emergency Boot Disk, get into safe mode from the Start Up Menu, then restore normal mode and get into Windows98 and Internet Explorer. I was attempting to go online and try to find out what had happened to my computer – and also see if there was another program I could use other than scandisk to more quickly repair my surface drive – when I was abruptly thrown offline. I got an error message about my explorer.exe (don’t remember the exact error message – sorry).
So: I restarted my computer. I was attempting to go back into Windows 98 when I got another error message about command.com being corrupted or missing, too. At this point, no matter what I did, I could not get back into Windows98. None of my troubleshooting tips in my manuals did the trick. I also cannot seem to move my computer to a point where it executes ANY .exe files from the C:\ drive – most of the ones I tried can’t be done in DOS.
I checked my C:\ directory – all my files and programs are apparently still there in their respective directories, and the drive volume seems to be where its supposed to be. I have seen command.com but not explorer.exe. (unless its IE6setup.exe, in which case I have)
At this point I would like: 1) suggestions or links to websites explaining how I might be able to restore command.com and/or explorer.exe (short of reformatting the drive or going to a data recovery center – I’m not that desperate and I’m too broke) so I can print them off from work and try it at home over the weekend.
Barring that, 2) do you have suggestions on how I can might be able to recover from DOS some documents and images from my C:\ drive that (stupidly) weren’t backed up?
- Is there a faster alternative to scandisk?
Thanks for your time. I’ll try to check back around 3:00 today, but I apologize that I won’t be able to respond to anyone’s follow-up questions again until I go to the public libarary tomorrow afternoon.