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rdanjuma

6 Posts

7065

October 14th, 2005 15:00

HELP! Reinstall (corrupted) Windows 98 SE without erasing all of hard drive. Partitions?

Greetings,

After 5 years without problems, my Dell Inspirion 7500 now starts up with a Windows 98SE setup page. When I enter the product ID code number, Windows causes an "invalid page fault" errror.

It appears that the operating system has been corrupted. I'm not sure why this is happening (I installed a small, innocuous program a week ago but that's the only difference so I'm not sure what happened).

Because I cannot start Windows it appears I now need to reinstall the operating system. The problem is that I don't want to lose all of the data currently on the hard drives (I have some data backed up to CD but I would still lose too much). Is there any way to reinstall or repair Windows98SE without erasing everything on the hard drive? Can this be done through DOS?

Dell technical support suggested that it is possible to partition the hard drive through DOS and reinstall Windows on 1 of the partitions. I can't currently find a guide on how to do this. Does anyone know where to find such a guide or have suggestions on how to proceed under these circumstances?

Thank you so much for your help.

Denny Denham

2 Intern

 • 

18.8K Posts

October 14th, 2005 15:00

rdanjuma,

Partitioning the hard drive through DOS will remove all the contents of your hard drive so that is not an option you should pursue. You may be able to recover by rebooting to a saved copy of a good registry. See the procedure here.

If that does not work, you can install Windows 98 over itself. While this normally results in an unstable system, it may provide sufficient operability to allow you to back up your perishable data to removable media prior to doing a clean reintallation (including formatting) of Windows.

rdanjuma

6 Posts

October 14th, 2005 17:00

Hey,
 
Thanks so much for the information.  I would like to reinstall Windows 98 over itself now that you've mentioned it's an option.   Is there a way to do this and be sure that it won't format the hard drive?  When I used the floppy boot disk it basically only gave me the option to do a full install.  It sounded like that erased the hard drive and so I didn't proceed with it.  The online files listed in the forum FAQ also seem to say that the full install erases everything.  Let me know if I should use a special procedure or if I just if if reinstalling Windows 98 over the old version is self-explanatory. 
 
And thank you so much again for your help. 
 
 

Message Edited by rdanjuma on 10-14-2005 01:44 PM

Denny Denham

2 Intern

 • 

18.8K Posts

October 14th, 2005 20:00

rdanjuma,

See this document, especially the section entitled "Recover Hard Drive without Format."

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