Evil children?

Hi all,

A friend of mine who has a W98FE machine and a little daughter
came to me and said "she just deleted a bunch of files, can you
rebuild it?" I got the key id with jelly bean and copied the cabs
subdirectory to another hd. Then I rebooted/repartitioned/
reformated the main drive into C and D. Then I copied back the
cab directory to a directory on D drive I called WIN98. So far
so good. C drive is clean/empty and is 4G and D is 2.1G and
has the WIN98 directory from the old hard drive before
reconfiguration. I went to the WIN98 directory and typed in
"setup" and it wasn't there. I copied a SETUP.EXE file from
anoher W98FE machine and when I type it in on the computer
it came from I get the appropriate response. I copied the file
to the WIN98 directory on the machine I am trying to
reconfigure and the response I get is "just jumps back to the
command prompt". I thought it might be that the scandisk
program was absent but it is in fact in the WIN98 directory.
What am I missing, why doesn't setup go through its' normal
process?

thanks for any hints,
charles.....