Installing Windows 98 over bad Windows 98 SE

[owlsnesttoo]

I "lost" more than 250MB of my Windows 98 SE operating system. I have an OEM computer and do not have setup.exe for Windows 98SE. I have a recovery CD, but won't reformat the harddrive as I will lose 2GB of data. My CD-writer (and most else) won't work. I have a full version of Windows 98 Gold on a CD with the key. Can I safely install it over what is left of Windows 98 SE?

Sharon

[alexanrs]

Probably not. If you can, boot using a Win98 boot disk and the delete the Windows folder, then, using the same boot disk, install. This should be better. Also, if I were you, I'd find a linux live CD and use it to back your data up.

[owlsnesttoo]

Thank you so much! I figured I was going to have lots of problems with the "new" files being older than the originals, but didn't know how to get around that without reformatting the drive. I've already created a Windows 98 SE boot disk, so will try to use that.

[dandnsmith]

I don't know how you 'lose' 250MB of the OS, except via a HDD going bad.

I'd go with the suggestion to get the data backed up as fast as possible (linux is a good tool, if you can use it) and work out what to do next - you could even consider using the recovery CD, since you'll lose the software anyway if you blitz the windows directory.

[Ponch]

If you can, get a friend to get you a bootable GPartEd CD (free equivalent of Partition Magic) and create a 2nd partition on your disk. Move your data and fresh install the first partition.

[owlsnesttoo]

How do you lose 250MB of your OS? Very good question! An updated virus scan shows nothing ( for the last year or two can no longer scan boot records though with Norton Antivirus). A full 2-hour surface scan of the HDD shows no bad clusters. A week before the crash I added a "new" 2003 ViewSonic monitor which had showed no intervening problems (didn't update the drivers though).

I was performing a very belated backup of my data files when my HP CD-writer+ froze up the system. No choice but to do a crash restart - seemed okay, but ruined the CD. Same thing once again (never had a problem before and I've burned about 30 data CDs). I had only 300 MB free space on my 6GB HDD, so thought maybe a memory problem. Burned a new CD with about 1/3 of the files and successfully ejected it (it reads fine). Did a manual restart and at that point I got a registry error, system found a new registry, and then Windows 98 SE failed to boot.

I had to get a couple of .sys files off the Windows 98 CD (using a friend's computer to copy to floppy) and finally managed to get Windows 98 SE to boot, but immediately noticed that the settings, utilities, help, and a lot else were "gone." I reinstalled Scandisk and ran it in repair mode and it "returned" to me more than 250 MB of freshly released space, which I can only assume was once a major portion of the operating system (and who knows what else). The CD-writer will now read, but won't write without a new operating system (I get errors when I try to even open software so installing new is out). I'm on dial-up internet access and have no external hard drive or a friend with one (I guess we are all hopelessly out of date!).

I've spent 8 hours e-mailing to myself zip files of the most important data, but don't want to lose the rest of the 2GB, so at the moment the recovery CD is out.

I was hoping to copy and save my desktop icons (all that's left of my settings), plus Windows subfolders and drivers needed for the pre-installed software, although my ability to do the latter is questionable at best. I don't use that software much if at all anyway, and plan to reinstall MS Office, HP DLA (for the CD-writer), the printer software, mouseware, etc. as none of them work at the moment.

Right now the uninstall utility is gone so delete by brute force to create space is my only option. Partitioning the HDD is an idea, but I've never done it and I just have no idea if it would work anyway as many Windows commands (including DOS programs) are missing. I really don't want to make the situation worse.

So, I will save what I can in separate folders and I plan to delete some of the Office files to make room for the Windows 98 Gold installation files on the HDD. Then boot to the startup CD, delete the old Windows and Internet Explorer folders (I've already deleted Messenger and Networking folders), and run setup from DOS.

If anybody has any ideas why all of this happened in the first place, I'm all ears! Thanks a bunch to everyone who responded,

Sharon.

[dandnsmith]

Sharon -

sounds like you've gone a bit too far for the best recovery strategy, as you're writing more files over recovered space. I seem to remember, on one occasion, using a recovery CD (linux based) which would recover the FAT using the fact that there is a secondary copy which (strangely enough) Windows doesn't use to recover from.

It sounds like you had a problem some way down the FAT chain, and that is how you lost so much at one go.

I'll really have to dig out my rarely used tools and have another look at capabilities - UBSD and System Recovery CD come first to mind, but I think I have others, such as Recovery Is Possible. Since you can boot these independently, and write info to various destinations, without compromising the original filesystem, they offer a good chance of recovery.

[owlsnesttoo]

Oh, yea, I think I'm way past trying to recover the data that was in the obliterated Windows folders. By the time I figured out that it was for sure not a mechanical failure of the hard drive itself, but of the FAT32 system, it was a little too late to worry about having overwritten what was contained in the Windows folders originally.

Lucky for me, the part of the FAT32 system that failed was in the operating system and not part of "My Documents" folder, which contains at least 3 GB of data, and is for the most part irreplacable. At least with the operating system files, I can replace them.

I went through my personal data files in order to e-mail to myself at Yahoo zip files of the most important stuff (maybe 600 MB worth so far on dial-up - sigh). I was able to clean up my data files until I had about 1.11 GB of available space. Yesterday I made a duplicate Windows folder and copied into it my desktop shortcuts, and any system or program files in the Windows folder and subfolders that had a different date stamp than the OS install date. That's taken the available space down to about 850 MB, which should be more than enough for installation of the replacement OS after the deletion of the original Windows folder (so I can install into a newly created folder).

What I "lost": all files in the C:\windows\application data\ folder and all of its subfolders (which wiped out all e-mail in Outlook Express and the "quick launch" icons, all files in the C:\windows\all users\ folder and subfolders, everything in the C:\windows\favorites\ and in the C:\windows\start menu\ (the most annoying losses), and all files and possible subfolders in C:\windows\help. I also lost a smattering of program, system and library files which may have been in the C:\windows\ directory itself which have affected the operation of most programs and external hardware. Also, since the above losses don't seem to equate to 250 MB, I may have lost some program files as well, but not sure about that.

There is something that you might be able to help me with. I had wanted to defragment the hard drive, so that I could at least install the new OS in large sequential chunks (as I don't want to reformat the entire drive). I found a copy of defrag.exe and tried to run it, but the first thing it does is a check for errors in the FAT32 system, and the check fails almost immediately, so the defragmentation process is not possible. However, my help system is gone, so I can't read the error messages or any other help messages as to what to do about it. I ran Scandisk again with the "/all" command and the FAT32 system came back with no errors.

Is there another file system program besides Scandisk.exe that might be able to repair the errors in the FAT32 system properly so that I can defragment before the reinstall of the OS? I think that I have a copy of Chkdisk.exe in the CAB files somewhere, but I've never used it and don't have normal help instructions available now.

Any ideas why the FAT32 system failed in the first place? I defragmented the hard drive last year some time, so the OS should've been in fairly sequential order on the HDD, but I had been getting "out of memory" errors for a couple of weeks, which was why I was trying to get data off onto CDs in the first place (down to 200 MB available space).

Sorry this was so long.

Sharon