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General discussion

Windows 98

Feb 6, 2005 8:42AM PST

Hi..
I have an old P166mhz running WIN98( not running now)which I passed down to my daughter and now my little boy 4 years old which is just fine for his activities.
It is set up with 2 hard drives a Maxtor 512MB and a Western Digital 2GB.
I may have inadvertently deleted the config.sys and other critical files for loading windows98. :&gtSad
I try to boot with the disk. It wont load safe mode. All I can do is try to install Windows but it stops due to insufficient disk space. I tried to format C: but the format command is not there??
I tried disconnecting the 512MB Drive and just leaving the 2GB drive in and switched the jumper on it to single drive and switched around the ribbon cables and get error reading drive???
Any help is appreciated!! I even tried the windows 95 boot floppy that came with the computer originally ...

Discussion is locked

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Well, presuming no hardware failure
Feb 6, 2005 9:05AM PST

reloading Win98 should not be so difficult but configuring and updating it could be a problem. Now, the config.sys is not critical. Maybe if you can remember what was deleted, there's a hope to save a full reinstallation. If the registry is damaged and you can boot as far as the command prompt, you can give "scanreg /restore" a try. This will allow you to use a previous copy of the registry and sometimes helps. If it comes to requiring a full rebuild and you have an original Win98 CD including the product ID code, this can be done booting from the CD. The format command is located in the Win98 folder so you need to change to that directory to run the format command. Do so from C:\ by typing "CD Win98" (without quotes). From here you can type format C:\ (or C:\ /s to add system files). The CDs installation file is called Setup.exe. I think you should be able to do a clean installation this way as well but it's been a while since I have done so. Hope this gives a starting point.

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Thanks!
Feb 6, 2005 9:44AM PST

Thanks Steve ! I am reformatting the hard drive :&gtSad..
Will I have to reformat the 2GB drive as well??
Good thing it isn't my 120GB hard drive on my other machine! which also reminds me to back up that drive !!! Thanks again!

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The second drive
Feb 6, 2005 9:20PM PST

should not need to be reformatted unless data is corrupt and it cannot be read. The drive with the OS installed is what's needed to access hardware and software on the rest of the machine. If you had to install any software and run it from the second drive, that will likely require reinstallation as well but not a drive format.