I figured I'd post this here instead of software because I may need to reformat / reinstall to get this computer working again. An older 333 AMD K6-2 now gives me the error when I attempt to boot: (something along the lines of ) error reading drive C, Registry is corrupt. Retry, Abort, Ignore. The bootup to Win98 goes no further. I've tried the quick version of scandisk from dos but it doesn't fix the problem. Will the detailed scandisk fix the problem? I may try that. As a side note, this computer had been locking up mid-day for some reason I've not been able to determine, requiring a hard power down to get it to restart. In that process over several restarts I'm assuming the hard drive became corrupt, that is if the lockup problem wasn't already due to a corrupt hard drive. Any way to restore a registry before I go to more desperate measures? Would you suggest reformating then reinstalling? How do I make sure the bad disk sectors aren't reused after a format?
What I would do is buy a new hard drive and install it as the master (bootable) hard drive. Hard drives are very cheap these days. Make your existing harddrive the slave (you will have to change the little plastic thing over the pins on the drive itself to do this). Then, install your OS on this new drive. Hopefully, you will be able to read off your old drive to get your important stuff off onto the new drive. Finally, when all of the stuff you need is off of the old drive, fdisk and reformat it and use it for storage. Hope this helps, Rich
Computers are cheap! Break down and build yourself a new system. For less than $500 you can do it and its alot less aggravation.
You can actually try to reformat the drive (Fdisk, format and relay the OS) and start over. You can add a new hard drive and make the existing one a slave, copy your needed data and reformat the old drive. Or you can upgrade the whole computer. Just depends on your wishes. The hardware out there today is varied and relatively cheap so I'd probably opt to advise for one of the upgraded hardware options heavily leaning for a whole new one. I'd look into networking the two machines and expand the capabilities of both machines.
I already bought one for about that price, just was wondering if there was a way to bring this thing back from the dead. That and I enjoy a tinkering project from time to time. I may even take my first try out on Linux with the old computer - been thinking about this for a while.
And try to format and reinstall OS. If after doing that you still get errors then try a new hard drive. Good luck! P.S. I know about the tinkering thing. I have built 2 systems in the past 4 months. Its alot of fun.
there are limited experiences of taking full backup's of a HDD and repeating the problem on a fresh install, or another system. Try to use the old method of hardcopy for extremely important things (phone lists, favorite pictures, source code, etc.). Try to use limited copy means, like 1.44" FDD's for other essential code, but scan for viruses. Consider a lot of what you had as lost, and just revisit those websites, processes or other email client software (inbox, sent box, etc, that's stored locally) and try to rebuild on the new platform. Cheers