Win98 Crash - How Can I Repair It?

Yesterday my PC worked fine. I then uninstalled some software and during the
delete of the files that the uninstall did not remove, the PC "crashed."

When I tried to resart, the system messages indicated that I was missing
files and could not start windows. My System Start-up disk for this
particular PC has disappeared so I copied the missing files from another PC
and restarted, only to find there were more missing files!

I tried booting from a Universal Boot Disk but it indicated there were
problems with my drives....

I want to SOMEHOW repair my Win98 without losing my user files that were not
backed up yesterday....

1) Can I use my Win98SE disk to "repair" my PC or will this wipe out *.doc,
*.xls, *.jpg, and *.dat files on my hard drive? (Not worried about the
software as I have Office2000 Cd - just worried about my files)

2) Or, can I use my WinXP CD to "upgrade" to XP and thus not lose any of
these same files?

3) Is there something else that I should do / try to save my stuff?

THANKS

PROBLEM - FIXED!!

"cates2" wrote:

Yesterday my PC worked fine. I then uninstalled some software and during the
delete of the files that the uninstall did not remove, the PC "crashed."

When I tried to resart, the system messages indicated that I was missing
files and could not start windows. My System Start-up disk for this
particular PC has disappeared so I copied the missing files from another PC
and restarted, only to find there were more missing files!

I tried booting from a Universal Boot Disk but it indicated there were
problems with my drives....

I want to SOMEHOW repair my Win98 without losing my user files that were not
backed up yesterday....

1) Can I use my Win98SE disk to "repair" my PC or will this wipe out *.doc,
*.xls, *.jpg, and *.dat files on my hard drive? (Not worried about the
software as I have Office2000 Cd - just worried about my files)

2) Or, can I use my WinXP CD to "upgrade" to XP and thus not lose any of
these same files?

3) Is there something else that I should do / try to save my stuff?

THANKS

"cates2" wrote in message
...
PROBLEM - FIXED!!
Did one of your solutions you mentioned work?
Did you do a Registry restore?
How about posting what you did to fix it.

Would rather not post the "fix" as it was probably not the purist's way of
doing things... I however, had nothing to lose AND all to gain because of my
situation.

Don't know if there would have been any other method of resolving other than
reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Win98 from scratch - obviously
the clean way!

My advice to anyone is POST TO THIS FORUM AS SOON AS YOU FIND A PROBLEM you
can't resolve within an hour!!

THANKS

"Buffalo" wrote:


"cates2" wrote in message
...
PROBLEM - FIXED!!
Did one of your solutions you mentioned work?
Did you do a Registry restore?
How about posting what you did to fix it.

"cates2" wrote in message
...
Would rather not post the "fix" as it was probably not the purist's way of
doing things... I however, had nothing to lose AND all to gain because of my
situation.

Don't know if there would have been any other method of resolving other than
reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Win98 from scratch - obviously
the clean way!

My advice to anyone is POST TO THIS FORUM AS SOON AS YOU FIND A PROBLEM you
can't resolve within an hour!!

THANKS

"Buffalo" wrote:


"cates2" wrote in message
...
PROBLEM - FIXED!!
Did one of your solutions you mentioned work?
Did you do a Registry restore?
How about posting what you did to fix it.
Thanks for responding.
I would guess that you just installed Windows over itself.
Happy to hear it's working fine.

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 07:02:09 -0700, cates2

I want to SOMEHOW repair my Win98 without losing my user files that were not
backed up yesterday....

No, you don't.

You want to safeguard your data FIRST, by copying it off the stricken
system, before writing wads of OS code to the at-risk HD and then
running Windows, which will in turn write even more junk (temp files,
swap file writes) over whatever's left of any "lost" data you may have
been able to recover otherwise.

Relevant clickfood:

http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/bthink.htm

http://cquirke.mvps.org/pccrisis.htm

http://cquirke.mvps.org/whatmos.htm

http://cquirke.mvps.org/reinst.htm



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