reinstall WIN 98

[trebor]

A friend is getting an error message saying that Explorer has caused an illegal operation and WIN 98 will not fully load. Then he has to shut down improperly. When he restarts, Scandisk runs and then he gets the same error message. Should WIN 98 be reinstalled? Can WIN 98 be reinstalled right over itself. Are there any special procedures for doing this.

[MaryJ]

yes it can be reinstalled right over itself. it may not fix the problem, but all you've wasted will be a couple of hours. stick in the cd and run setup. actually, you should boot to dos with cd drivers installed and run it from there, if your version of win98 allows that (some upgrades don't)

[trebor]

If reinstalling WIN 98 over itself does not fix the problem, is the next step formatting the C drive and doing a clean install??? Is there any other approach???

[MerC]

Yes. You can do a clean install by putting Windows into a different Directory from its present one - specified during the install process. You need enogh HD space to do this. This is a 'clean install'. A degree of reinstalling of apps may be necessary, so that you can remove the original Windows (now redundant) folder.
<font color=d2691e>wwww : Welcome to the Wonderful World of Windows</font color=d2691e>

[MaryJ]

i'd delete the windows directory and run setup instead of reformatting. however, first i'd try some troubleshooting before i took that drastic of a step, since you'll need to reinstall everything.

exactly what does the error say? just that it caused a fault? was any new software installed recently? have you tried regscan and restored an older regsitry? (windows keeps the past 5 days worth)

a search of the MS KB might help, or even just an internet search using google or atlavista. you'll probably get a ton of hits though.

[jscher2000]

Probably your friend can boot to a C prompts and navigate to the Windows folder manually. Perhaps comparing file sizes and dates with another Win98 install will identify a corrupted file you could swap. Unfortunately, Windows has so many parts that this might be more difficult than reinstalling it. On the other hand, at least you can make some backups before doing that.