Thanks for the help. I thought it was pretty much a lost cause. I do have
all the original disks and product key codes, so I guess I will reformat and
reinstall.
--
gray57
just want to learn more


"98 Guy" wrote:

gray57 wrote:

I have a computer that ran windows 98 SE.
My kid got a virus on it

I removed the hard drive and did a virus scan from another computer.
I copied all documents, pictures, worksheets etc onto a CD to save
information.

Put back the hard drive and tried to boot up and it stalls.

Any pointers greatfull appreciated.

My primary suggestion would be to purchase a new drive. An 80 gb IDE
drive would cost about $40 or $50 bucks, and would probably be the
smallest capacity (and least expensive) drive that you can still easily
purchase new. I suggest buying a new drive because your existing drive
is probably 5 to 10 years old and is probably very close to the end of
it's mechanical life.

But in any case, even if you keep using the original drive, the best
course of action would be to reformat it and reinstall windows 98.
There is no easy, automatic, or zero-cost way to run a repair program on
the drive to "freshen up" the files and surgically remove all remnants
of viral activity, repair any registry dammage or file dammage, etc.
Such programs don't exist.

I'm thinking that you no longer have a win-98 installation CD. You can
obtain one from a torrent very easily. The only hassle with
re-installing win-98 is that you'll (probably) have to hunt down the
motherboard and video drivers and have them ready to install once the
initial win-98 install has finished.

Taking out the drive and slaving it to another computer (presumably a
windows XP machine) was a good idea as far as scanning it for malware.
But the best you can do in that situation is remove the mal-files, scan
the drive for bad sectors and repair the file system (cross-linked
sectors) and defrag it.

I guess you could try to start it in DOS mode (press f8 repeatedly while
it's booting so you get the startup menu, select command prompt, then
run the command "scanreg /fix". If that doesn't work, then try again,
but this time enter the command "scanreg /restore" and select an older
version of the registry (select them all, one at a time, until you run
out of selections or the system starts normally).

If Win-98 isin't starting for you (if instead it's trying to re-install
itself) then you're best off formatting the drive and performing a
correct installation from a win-98 CD.