Reinstalling Win98

[Mandi]

Rich,

Thanks for the advice, I'll give it a field run and report back, hoepfully from the cranky laptop in question.[nbsp][nbsp]Just to cross reference another thread someplace, we should all rest easy knowing the Dell support people don't work all night and holiday weekends like the rest of us . . . dunno whether to laugh or be mad about that one!!

[Justin]

In 98 it's not as obvious when to press F8 - I miss it too often. Fortunately there is another way - hold Control down during the entire boot process (ignore any "Stuck key" messages) and you'll get the boot menu.

How did you end up having to reinstall? Did you delete / lose some files?

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Mandi]

I had to have a motherboard replacement on my 3-month old laptop last March.[nbsp][nbsp]Ever since, I occasionally get a really hard freeze - I have to unplug and drop out the battery to get it to shut down, and then I have to haul out the screwdriver, drop out the hard drive, boot without the hard drive, put it back, boot with the hard drive, and go through the disk recovery thing.[nbsp][nbsp]Dell swears it's a Windows thing, despite the fact that it has only happened since the new motherboard was installed.[nbsp][nbsp]The last time I did this, it didn't recover all the way, and I am getting prompts to reinstall Windows98 to replace some missing or corrupt files.[nbsp][nbsp]Fortunately, I also have a desktop, but it's clunky and I get dirty looks from my hubby while I use it.

*********************

The F8 trick did indeed elude me . . . I think, as Justin says, I just missed the chance.[nbsp][nbsp]However, the ctrl button thing did get me to the startup menu - found the C:\> . . . but I CANNOT get it to cd to my CD-ROM drive, which was e drive, the last time I looked.[nbsp][nbsp](My hard drive is partitioned into c and d.)[nbsp][nbsp]When I DO give it a drive it knows - like d - it flashes to the D prompt, and then right back to the C prompt, grrrrr.

Any old Die Hard DOS users out there?[nbsp][nbsp]Why won't it listen to one of the three commands I do remember?[nbsp][nbsp]I sure don't have an MS-DOS book anymore, I tend to flush that sort of info from the bookshelf and the brain :(![nbsp][nbsp]Oh, I could also use the command that keeps the screen from scrolling, when a listing takes up more than one screen.

Thank you . . . .[nbsp]

[MG Doran]

Mandi,
Sounds like your CD driver isn't loading. Try your Win98 Emergency Boot disk.
It will give you the option of loading generic CD drivers and you should then be able to cd to your CD drive.
To keep the screen from scrolling add /p to the command line. For example to look at a directory listing page by page just type:
dir/p
If I'm understanding correctly your Windows won't fully load due to some missing or corrupt files and you're trying to reinstall them from dos (?)
Hope this is of some help,
Roxie (aka MG Doran)
[This message has been edited by MG Doran (edited 07-03-99)]

[Mandi]

I need to reinstall some files from the Win98 CD.[nbsp][nbsp]HOWEVER, the missing files allow me to boot completely, thereby having access to Start | Run | etc.[nbsp][nbsp]Obviously this can be done from the C:\> . . . but I'll be a turnip-brain if I can remember how to get to the DOS prompt without first visiting the full Windows screen.[nbsp][nbsp]It seems to me that it OUGHT to be accessible from the Setup utlitiy (ya know - F2 before it boots fully) but again . . . can't seem to locate it.

DOS was about fifty years ago in computer years, and I think I reformatted that part of my brain's memory . . . . suggestions??

[Justin]

First of all, why is your hard drive partitioned? I don't see a reason...

If it were me, I'd take that laptop back in. It's a hardware problem, trust me. I can't see a Windows problem causing you to have to remove the drive and boot without it - Windows is ON the hard drive LOL!

I haven't reinstalled since last August (geez, 11 months!) and have never had hardware problems from Windows, and I've changed so much hardware it's pathetic (on my 3rd video card, running 2 sound cards, 2 hard drives, my 3rd modem, etc etc). And I run 24 hours, 7 days (which explains going through 2 modems ;)) It's definately either the MB or the drive itself - sounds to me like it's the drive (maybe they dropped it when they replaced the motherboard?).

I would start with a new hard drive (and no partitioning) first...

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Rich]

Mandi:

Press F8 while Windows is starting and a startup menu will be displayed that will allow you to boot to DOS, safe mode, etc.

Rich

[Ron]

Justin, I'm curious as to why you suggest not partitioning? There is absolutely no performance cost involved, and a great many benefits.

Curious Ron :)

[Justin]

What benefits? Unless you're running multiple OS's, I don't understand the need for partitioning. I like to know that I have as much space as I could need all in one place.

I think it's more psychological than anything - because back in the old days, the only reason you would partition a drive was because you had to - because certain OS's couldn't handle a drive bigger than 540 megs. Now there is no need, and I don't see any benefits at all - please enlighten me if there are any :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Mandi]

It's partitioned 'cause it came that way out of the box, and I've never thought to un-partition it.[nbsp][nbsp]Weird, cause it was a Win98 OS to start with.[nbsp][nbsp]Oh, well, maybe they had too many customers new to Win98 who were freaking out when they saw the big drive on one space.

I am sooo not looking forward to sending it back, but I too think, deep down, that this is hardware.[nbsp][nbsp]I used to live just an hour from the Dell Factory store . . . now we're talking a 2 day drive or UPS, ick.[nbsp][nbsp]Gripe gripe gripe . . .

Okay, one more DOS request . . . I think I can copy my data files (unfortunately, it doesn't *all* live at my various websites, LOL) since I can see them via directory listings from the C:\> . . . . *more ignorance confessions*[nbsp][nbsp]. . . . what was that syntax and command, again . . . to copy something from c to a?

[Justin]

I'm not awake yet <yawn>, so here's a brief tutorial on copy:

copy source, [destination]
If destination isn't specified, the current working directory is assumed.

Example:
C:\data> copy *.* a:\data
C:\data> copy myfile.txt a:\myfile.txt

You can type copy /? to get a description with all available options...

Oh, the scrolling thing - the /p switch only works with dir - if you need something else to pause on each screen, place | more after the command:

type myfile.txt | more

This will make it pause on each screenfull....

I noticed the help command no longer works :([nbsp][nbsp]I wonder if it's me or they actually quit putting it in...? You used to be able to type help command, where command was the name of any internal DOS command... it's gone now :(

Oh, well, anyway, I use dos quite a bit still. I started in the PC world on a 5150 - IBM's origional PC (mine was an XT - had a hard drive :)) running DOS 3.3, which I upgraded to 5.0 (anyone else remember when DOS 5.0 was just sooo cool? Like if you didn't have it, you didn't have the move command, dosshell (which I never used - Norton was better), doskey, and so much more... it came on two 5 1/4&quot; floppies it was so big :). Oh, then that Windows thing came out, but to use it you had to get rid of that beautiful 16 color CGA Hercules adapter and monitor and get a VGA. And of course you have to get a 386, too, and 640 k of RAM is no longer enough... twas the end of the computing world as we knew it - but it grew on us, we started to like Windows. After all, it was basically just a DOS program, a front end with a GUI - and it was pretty neat. And you could always exit into DOS when you needed to do any *real* computer work.

But of course, these days, nobody remembers any of that - a lot of people that I know do not know what DOS is, and would be completely lost if they weren't greeted with a GUI.

And why doesn't Scroll lock do anything anymore? I can't figure that out - it's handy when you don't want to use the mouse... I don't think it's done anything since Win 3.11...

Anyone else remember BE.EXE? Batch Enhancer? I used to use it to write neat little boot menus - even in Win 95 - to allow me to bypass Windows or load Mortal Kombat, which for some reason needed a special configuration to run (and wouldn't run once you booted Windows).

Last but not least, does anyone else think these extra buttons are IN THE WAY? You know which one's I mean - the ones with the flag on them? I can't count how many times already I've hit that instead of alt when trying to save a file... or instead of control when copy/pasting... I'm about to either a) pop them off the keyboard, b) glue them so they won't press, or c) disable them inside the keyboard so they are just dead...

Well, that was fun :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Charles Capps]

*fondly remembers the days of entering PC Mag. code in debug....*[nbsp][nbsp]Ah, the memories...
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"Okay, so I'm not "SANE" so to speak, but uh... I'm the lovable kind of psycho"
http://solareclipse.net/

[Ron]

Mandi - depending on what you're trying to copy you can either use the copy command (per Justin), or use the xcopy command. Copy will ONLY copy files. Xcopy will copy both files and directories. As Justin suggested, for all the flags you can enter &quot;xcopy /?&quot; at a command prompt, but here's a typical use:

Move to your a: drive and enter &quot;xcopy c:\path\*.* /e&quot; The /e parameter tells the program to copy subdirectories beneath the path you give, even if they're empty. If you have no empty dirs, or don't want empty dirs, replace the /e with /s to get only directories with files in them. Whew, that's a mouthful... :)

[Ron]

Justin,

I'll *try* to keep this relatively short. Won't be easy... :)

First, let's clarify: when you mention multiple OS's you're talking about hard partions, of which you can have four and only one can normally be active at a time. Most OS's, including Win95 and Win98 (but not NT), will only see the their own partition. I'm talking about extended partitions and logical drives, where Win98 sees them as multiple physical disks. If Mandi has a d: drive, it's almost certainly a logical drive.

Second, let's talk about ease of use.

I lock up Win98 a few times a day (programming in C will do that :)) and that inevitably means an automatic ScanDisk on c: (and whatever other drive I was using). A scan on a 1 gig drive is a lot faster than a scan on a 13+ gig drive. Same, not incidentally, with defrag. Okay, I'll admit that won't apply to many...

I have two partitions set up as 650 meg drives. A quick xcopy makes those into very fast cd-rom drives. Again, unless you're like me and have a few cd's that you use a lot, this may not apply to you. 'Course you've mentioned a few games in the past that I can guarantee would be enhanced by the speed of a hard disk...

I use partitions the same way I use folders. My g: drive is strictly for graphics. My f: drive is for development. My i: drive is for the Internet. Et cetera. For me, putting everything on one drive is tantamount to putting everything in one folder. Yuck...

I could go on and on, but many of my reasons might not apply to most people (it's nice, for example, to know that when my low-level programs destroy a disk it's not going to be my c: drive). Besides, I'm sure you get the idea...

But let's also talk about performance. The big advantage fat32 has over the old DOS fat is smaller cluster size. Recalling the old &quot;one file per cluster&quot; rule, it's easy to see that if you have a lot of files smaller than your cluster size, you can waste a lot of disk space. Unfortunately, the larger your partition size, the larger your cluster size. Fat32 is a big improvement over the giant clusters of yesteryear, but it still requires larger clusters for large partitions. Specifically:

Partition size[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp] Cluster size
-------------------------------------
512 MB to 8,191 MB[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp]4 KB
8,192 MB to 16,383 MB[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp] 8 KB
16,384 MB to 32,767 MB[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp] 16 KB
Larger than 32,768 MB[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp]32 KB

For larger files (.exe and larger graphics, for example), an 8K cluster is fine. For .cpp or .html (or .php :)) a 4k cluster will literally save you half your disk space.

Ever see the old &quot;lost clusters&quot; error message? A large part of the reason behind that was that DOS used a linked list structure to store the FAT. Unfortunately, so does fat32. NTFS, on the other hands, uses a binary tree. Putting aside robustness, as a programmer, I'm sure you know that a linked list takes longer to read through than a binary tree. More importantly, the longer the linked list the more true that is. If you have one partition, you have one FAT table - and one very long linked list. Okay, I'll admit, on today's computers (and especially when the FAT is always cached), we're talking about fractions of a ms. But I'll bet Andrew will agree with me - every fractional ms counts when you've got a ton of disk activity going!

Finally (just because I'm tired of typing), I should also point out that some people still have to partition. Fat32 will support partitions up to 2 terabytes - but all but the most recent PC's have a 7.8 GB limitation built into the BIOS INT13 interface.

Whew. I'm tired. Think I'll go format a partition or something... :)

[Ron]

Mandi - I apologize for almost entirely forgetting the whole thrust of this thread. :)

Your previous post mentions that your hard freeze (and I ain't never seen one that hard) happens &quot;occasionally.&quot; If this is daily, or probably even weekly, I would agree with Justin this is likely a hardware problem, possibly the IED interface, cable, or hard disk. But if your hard disk works fine for extended periods, I would be willing to bet that reformatting and loading the OS will solve the problem. I would also check your BIOS settings to insure they match the characteristics of your hard drive. Asking the OS to write to a cylinder that is bad (or doesn't really exist) is a real good way to lock up Windows.

For your sake, I hope you don't have a lot of data to copy to floppies (they seem so much smaller than they did ten years ago). If there is a lot of data, you might consider interfacing the laptop to the desktop?

[Justin]

I disabled the automatic running of scandisk myself (using TweakUI) although if I think it's needed I do run it manually...

I program in VB, and I do crash the system often when figuring out certain API calls, etc - trial and error becomes very painful, but even the slightest error can cause a serious blue screen. Of course part of that is the API is written in C, and interfacing with VB, you have to convert null terminated strings, deal with differences in data types, etc - but that's another story :)

I suppose your needs are different - and you're right about cluster size. A lot of people don't realize that every shortcut on your computer uses a full cluster, including your bookmarks, start menu items, desktop stuff, etc - so cluster size is important to anyone, programmer or not...

Oh, and I did forget all about xcopy - I guess I've been stuck in this GUI too long :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Mandi]

Back to the cranky laptop - xcopy has been my friend![nbsp][nbsp]I found a workable DOS tutorial, just FYI, should there be someone else in my shoes (oh, man, if I never have to call another dir by whatev~1 . . . it'll be too soon)

http://homepages.enterprise.net/paulbutterwick/tutor/menu.html

One final question . . . if I reformat c, having stashed some files on the partitioned d section . . . does the format command recognize the partition, or am I gonna lose the whole disk?

[Ron]

Mandi, the format command requires you to specify the drive letter - such as &quot;format c:&quot; - and that is the only drive that it will even look at. Short answer - d: will be fine! The only DOS command that even knows what an extended partition is is the fdisk command (use with caution!), and all others (including format) will treat your d: drive as an actual, physical hard disk...

Be sure when you format the c: drive you do an &quot;unconditional&quot; format (I think it's a /u paramter). Otherwise, format will only zero out the FAT and not rewrite the tracks. If you are having a hard disk problem, you definitely want it to completely rewrite the tracks.

With any luck at all, that laptop should soon be humming! :)

[Mandi]

Well, I am backed up plenty, in order to wipe out the drive.[nbsp][nbsp]However, I have not been able to resolve the problem of getting DOS to read my cd-rom drive.[nbsp][nbsp]I did solve the problem of getting it to change to a: or d: from c (it's just too embarrassing for words :o!) Hopefully I am doing something equally dumb here, but I am *pretty* sure the drive is called e: . . . yields a &quot;invalid drive specification&quot; error, grrr.[nbsp][nbsp]In a fit of frustration, I tried calling it by drives f-m, and then gave up, realizing that was totally silly.

My big concern about proceding with the reformat, is being able to reinstall off the cd-rom drive, of course![nbsp][nbsp]*possibly this is the point at which I should turn it over to someone at the local 'puter smarty pants store* . . .[nbsp]

[Mandi]

CD-ROM drive problem solved, I had totally overlooked MG Doran's advice about the Win98 boot disk . . shazam, I've got drivers!![nbsp][nbsp]Onward . . .[nbsp]

[Justin]

Your 98 CD should have come with a boot disk - this disk should boot up the PC with all of the CD drivers etc...

One problem with xcopy that I should warn you about - it does NOT copy system files or hidden files, and you lose your long file names - meaning that once you reinstall windows, those filena~1.txt filenames will remian :(

I just installed a Maxtor 10 gig hard drive, and since I did not want to reinstall Windows, I had to copy everything over... but luckily after RTFM, I found that Maxtor's diskette has a utility that does that with no problem, keeping long filenames etc, so I didn't lose a thing from my 1.2 gig or my 400 meg drives :)[nbsp][nbsp]And it booted up just fine after that, as if nothing happened and the drive just grew (and it's sooooo much faster than the 1.2 :))

Well, I'm dismantling and packing the PC as soon as I send this... hitting the road. Florida, here I come :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Mandi]

Thank you so much for all the help, everyone.[nbsp][nbsp]Once again, FQbies network saves the day![nbsp][nbsp]Transmitting this from the laptop!!

Ultimately, I even failed to re-format . . . which was a good thing, because a good night's sleep and a fresh pot of coffee gave me the bright idea to use a working driver from the desktop (also a Win98 machine) to overlay the apparent missing driver (unfortunately, reinstalling Win98 didn't do the trick.)[nbsp][nbsp]So I am back with all my data intact, all my preferences intact . . . and thanks to FQbies, even (most) of my sanity, LOL.

THANK-YOU!!