likry,

If you start your computer with a boot floppy diskette in the drive it should boot to an A:\> prompt. This is true whether or not there is a CD in its drive (which I assume is D:\ on your system). Are you getting that prompt?

If you have a Dell branded Windows XP Recovery CD with Windows 98 on it, a boot diskette is not required. All that you need to do is to set your CD-ROM drive as the first boot device in the BIOS. The instructions for this are contained within this document.

Message Edited by Denny Denham on 02-11-2005 08:23 PM

I don't get the A:\ prompt on screen with the cd in. The screen stays blank. I only have the windows 98 disc that came with the computer.

Well,
My son installed Windows 98 with the disk that came with the computer, but it is not a recovery or reinstall disk. We did not get any purple disk with the computer, only the Windows disk that was used by Dell for the initial install. It says it is for PCs without Windows already on it.

It asked if he wanted to save existing DOS and Windows files and he said yes, it then copied Windows 98 onto the HD and saved the files.

Does that mean we have 2 of the same OS on the hard drive or did it over ride the original?

Also, I immediately ran an antivirus scan and it detected a change in the master boot program and asked if I wanted to save the changes , delete or ignore-I chose ignore because I am not sure what to do.

Also, before my son reinstalled OS, I couldn't get into the setup but now we can and it showed that the hard drive was in the #2 slot so we moved it to #1. Was this correct and could that have been the problem all along causing the dll files to not be detected?
Should I uninstall one of the Windows OS if there are 2 on it and which one-old or new?

Sorry for all the questions. I am trying but am really not very computer literate!
Thanks everyone so much for all your help!