Hi:

I have a Dell Dimension from about 2000 with Windows 98 SE, which was reinstalled about one year ago and has worked fine until this past weekend. 

The machine had trouble starting up and I was told to restart in safe mode.  It then couldn't recognize Microsoft Office so I reinstalled Word, Excel, Powerpoint and tried to do the same with Outlook but the machine got hung-up.  So I restarted it and go an error message saying it had to do scan disk which it started to do and found six or seven "bad sectors" before crashing again.  Now it won't startup even with the Windows 98 startup disk (it just tries reading the disk and nothing happens).  I was able to start up the computer with a Windows 95 startup disk I have from an old computer but I can't get it to do anything beyond show me an A> (won't switch to the "c" drive which is my hard disk).

Most importantly, I know my files are still on the hard drive and, of course, I haven't backed them all up so I want to make sure that I can get them off even if I have to somehow reformat the hard drive and start all over again.

Any suggestions?

Perhaps I have a bad Windows 98 startup disk. Is there any way to create a new one from another computer?

Is there anyway to reinstall Windows 98 without deleting the files on the hard-drive?

Thanks in advance.

Rob