Win98 reinstalling itself?????

[Masterfinn 0]

Hey all,

 

I have a win98 machine at home and it gave me some troubles a while back so i thought it was time for a good ol format and fresh install of the o/s. Everything went good and it was working great for a long time. Then one day when I went to turn on the pc, on boot up it came up with all these "found new hardware" screens and such and nothing was installed. Like the video drivers were not there sound etc... all gone its like they have never been installed before.. also all my applications that were installed before are gone. the links and icons are all there but none of the programs work. And in the control panel under add/remove programs there is not one single program listed there as if no programs have been installed. It even comes up with the welcome to windows screen when you boot up the computer. Its like it reinstalled its self or something. I saved all my data to my newer pc and im just about to redo this old one again, but i want to know if anyone out there could help me out on what happend or any suggestions. The computer is a generic mobo with a Amd k6-2 266cpu with 128MB of RAM.

Thanx,

 

Masterfinn

[Tomay 0]

Something like this happens if you delete system.dat and user.dat in the windows98 directory. You may have not deleted them yourself something could corrupt them (bad hard drive).

[matty 0]

sounds like you have a corrupt install... just reinstall and call it a day.

[Masterfinn 0]

Ya actually i did do a reinstall on it and it happened again so im going to just get a new cheap mobo and cpu with a new hardrive cause it does seem to be maby a bad hard drive.. it is pretty old... luckey its my old old pc not my new one so im not really to worried about it.. thanx for all the help

 

Masterfinn

[hardtofin 0]

how about trying an NT o/s like 2k or xp ?

[el_vago32 0]

Quote:

how about trying an NT o/s like 2k or xp ?

Not a BAD idea!!

[pbuckne 0]

I am really curious about this one. If you delete the enum key under the registry in win98, it will remove all the driver info from the registry. If you lost all of your programs links, that sounds like something restored an old copy of your registry. I worked at a company where a guy did this to a coworker for revenge, and the results looked exactly the same. What you end up with is all the info put into the registry AFTER the initial copy is made is removed, and working programs and drivers are eliminated. Any data you had on the drive would be intact, but all programs would need to be reinstalled before you can use it again. Interesting problem.