My son has an old compaq computer he inherited from his school when they bought new ones. It has a mixmatch of hardware. He was trying to delete something and as a result windows 98 opens but does not work correctly. I tried to re-install but can't get to setup as it says'cant access setup from dos'. Tried to change boot options which is currently 1 floppy 2 hd 3 cd but it I can't seem to change it. Anyway of a quick repair without having to do a clean install as we did not save all the drivers.

Thanks

If you can boot to safe mode F5 copy c:\windows\system,c:\windows\inf and c:\windows\system32 to a new folder of your choice, from bootdisk.com download a win98se startup disk, follow its instructions. Insert your 98se bootdisk from bootdisk and enable cdrom option after putting your 98se cdrom into the drive. Navigate to your cdrom drive it will show you this on boot up. Type cd cdrom drive letter (probably d:) then run setup, for unknown devices it cannot find during setup point it to the inf folder and then the system or system32\drivers folder you have saved previously. You will probably need to reinstall any programs you were using. Simply restoring the registry i.e system.dat user.dat would be the quickest option but depending upon what has been deleted the above option hopefully will get it working.

All the best

Edited January 16, 200719 yr by oscardog