win98woes

hi all. so i am working on this laptop. it has win98 installed but it wont boot. it will go through scandisk and check structures etc. then it goes to black screen w/ cursor then the cursor dissapears and thats it. nothing else. i reboot and get scandisk or options menu. i dosnt seem to make a bootfile either as i cant find it anywhere. i cant simply format because of critical data on the drive. what can i do. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as i am ready to become a member of the bald heads as i tear my hair out.

 

tried to reinstall over top?

 

u mean like setup /nr ?
i am worried that if i run setup it will reformat the partition and thus delete current data.

 

no, just boot up with the cd and run the setup like normal. it will prompt you for a location to put windows because it already detects it. The new location it will want is Windows.000 .. delete the .000 and confirm the warning messages. It will reinstall win98 using that installations registry.

 

well, it wont boot into safe mode and i did try to install windoze over itself but was told i need upgrade disk but that another issue entirely i think because the only win98 cd i have is se that came with my desktop sooo i have to get the other cd from the owner of the laptop. thank you so much for helping me though.i am going to assume that the overlay will work with no hitch lol.thanx

 

have you tried the 'scanreg' utility?

 

no i used the fixreg though. with no success

 

i just wanted to give a quick update... i did get the sucker running. i started with windows98 install but it told me i need an upgrade cd. the upgrade cd did not want to boot. so i started with win98 install then switched cds to win98 upgrade. it worked. i installed win98 into the c:windows directory as suggested by Kodo and sure enough all the things where still there and windows worked just fine. thanks for all your help.