windows 98 desktop big probem

fwor

marleyboy wrote: »

There are two different types of restore that you can do with Windows 98

Yeah, I know - Google found the same articles for me too. But neither is a "system restore" in the sense that we know it now, where the OS keeps its own restore points on the hard disk.

Both are "restores from previous backups" which have previously been written to removable media. AFAIK the OP has no such backups.

mr_accountant

marleyboy

i have tried both methods: the first one came up with bad command- or something similar

the second one allowed me to restore a backup version (dated 9th july) but when the comp restarted it was back to the loop with all the info from my initial post.

closed

scanreg restore the registry from a backup contained on the c drive, the system creates 5 of these by default.

It doesn't restore files, unless they have been manually specified beforehand, so you need to see if the files are there or not in dos if you want to try and fix it, rather than reinstall.

To get to the dos command prompt, boot, hold down F8 at boot

c:
cd \
dir base4.cab /s



If you have the w98 cab files on CD or hard disk, the vxd's will be in there, and can be decompressed using extract from dos.

EXTRACT /Y /A \win98\BASE4.CAB ifsmgr.vxd /L c:\windows\system\vmm32

Avast 4 still works on W98 btw.

Reinstalling W98 might not be that simple, if there are missing drivers which are no longer on the manufacturers website, so you may want to attempt a fix first.

mongoose2009

if you have the win98 disk then just boot from that and do a full reinstall
you can just rename the previous win98 install to windows.old
install all you drivers etc

mr_accountant

mongoose2009 wrote: »

if you have the win98 disk then just boot from that and do a full reinstall
you can just rename the previous win98 install to windows.old
install all you drivers etc

yes that would be ok, how would i do this?

Donnie

Does your machine have a brand name?

closed

If those 2 files are the only problem, a reinstall is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, it would take 2 minutes to extract them from the cabinet files and copy them into place, or if you have a floppy disk available, you could download them.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Someone mentioned extracting from a CAB file, excellent idea for circa W98. Someone correct me if my memory is wrong but the only two files in the CAB's that are of no use are the autoexec.bat and the config.sys which are empty till written by the HAL. The HAL [ Hardware Abstraction Layer ] then writes the boot instructions to two files called autoexec.bat and config.sys.

W98 at the boot point takes it's boot instructions from autoexec.bat and config.sys and ' calls different files for different purposes during the boot process ' for example the IFSMGR.VXD [ Installable File System Manager ] mentioned above along with IOS.VXD and others.

BootDisk still holds an archive from which you can more readily get an autoexec.bat and a config.sys file but you will still need someone to rewrite it in DOS for you, before you can use it. Even if you arrive at that point as ' closed ' says you may well struggle to get drivers for a board of that age.

closed

autoexec and config.sys loads tsrs, sets environment variables, and loads dos drivers, not vxd's

Doing anything with the SAS quarantine (if SAS is actually the culprit) will be difficult if windows doesn't boot.

expanding 256k of vxd and rebooting to test would take less time than it took to write this post assuming a floppy disk drive is available on both machines, or the W98 machine has a realmode cdrom driver in config.sys, or the cab files are on c: already.

Donnie

As long as he has the Ethernet Driver there's always a chance. Though it would help if he came forward with some more information.