Corrupted my 98SE/OS by slaving infected HD?

Greetings Wise Geeks:

I was attempting to gain access to a possibly infected (standard PC) Fujitsu HD (from an apx. 5 y/o Gateway tower system) by slaving it to a Win98SE Western Digital HD (on a Dell Dimension XPS R450 PII system) containing virus detection/repair tools.

FDISK said the Fujitsu contained a 'non-DOS' partition, which made no sense, as it came from a Win98SE system. Suspecting virus, I wiped and successfully restored Win98SE to the Fujitsu HD, without problems, on the Gateway system it came from.

However, upon trying to use my Western Digital (Dell) "toolkit" system, I realized the OS had become corrupted, with lots .chk files, a missing win.com file, a corrupted registry error, and so on. I now also have a Windows.001 folder, possibly because I partially ran (then quit) Windows setup with the hope of finding the setup option of repairing an existing OS (no joy - the setup program did not show me this option). Foolishly, I have no backup of my Western Digital hard-drive. Now my questions:

1. Can known-good master hard drive get corrupted during the boot process by it being connected to an infected slave? I always assumed virus could only become active on a drive that was booted to, but maybe I'm wrong.

Or is it more likely that I corrupted my master, during the boot process, by improperly jumpering the slaved drive?

2. What software tool(s) do you guys suggest I use in attempting to repair my Western Digital Win98SE installation? I have lots and lots of software I don't want to re-install to this HD, if I can avoid it.

I have Symantec/Norton "System Works Professional Edition" '01 handy, but would like suggestions on other software that might do the repair job better.

I suspect I'll end up retrieving my datafiles from my corrupted Western Digital HD, and then wiping and re-installing my software, but I'm willing to give some repair software a shot on this system, especially since it's my own system and not someone else's.

Thanks in advance for kind feedback.

Appreciatively,

Larry Kelley
Saratoga, NY

 

First question is: Have you tried booting to DOS and then typing SCANREG/RESTORE in order to try an earlier (and hopefully working) version of the registry?

2nd question: If you cannot boot to DOS on the hard drive, can you boot uo using a Win98SE bootdisk (floppy)? In other words so you can then try SYS C:
I'm just asking because its best to try the easy things first