Hi Marty,
Just a couple of thoughts. First, you could pick up a good size hard drive for under $100 any number of places. For example: ubid.com
I've bought a couple there (from Ubid; haven't tried their partners, etc.) and had no problems; pretty much the same as any other Internet source. Pull your c drive so that you don't accidentally screw it up and put a new drive in it's place and install windows. Make sure you do the follow thru and get the latest drivers, applications updates, etc. If you presently have two drives, make your old c-drive a slave to your new c-drive and put your old d-drive as master on the seconadary IDE with the cdrom as the slave. If you only have one drive, install it as the master on the secondary drive. Either way, make sure you assign the cdrom the drive letter it will end up with as your first item of business after the OS oinstall completes. Otherwise, if you do everything as suggested the cdrom will move down a letter per partition on the old c-drive. This allows you to recoover things you might have forgotton at your leisure.
If you want to reinstall on the same drive, copy the Win98 install directory to the c-drive (not the whole CD). Then boot to the dos prompt by pressing F8 and selcting safe mode command prompt. Type "set path=c:\windows\command" without the quotes and then type "move progra~1 prog_old" and then "move windows win_old". Then type "set path=".
Then cd into the win98 install directory you copied onto the hard drive, type setup, and go with the flow. Make sure you do not accept windows suggested install directory (win_old). Have it use c:\windows. When you are done you will have to reinstall everything as in the first paragraph
but you will not have lost anything. I'm not aware of any programs that delete old data on an install over the original directory, but a backup ahead of time never hurts.
You will now be blessed with much the same windows as the rest of us. If the same problems still occur you either have a driver conflict or hardware problem. Although I suppose their might be an oddball application that could corrupt things. You might want to save non-mainstream stuff until you see how it behaves for a while. This all pre-supposes that you have eliminated virus's, etc. as possible causes.
Good luck,
Steve |
