Question:
What brand computer? What kind of installation media do you have? A standard
Win98 CD? Or some "Recovery CD"?
Answer:
If this problem is less than five days old, restore a copy of the registry
that predates the onset of the problem and see if that helps. The five-day
limit assumes that the computer is booted every day. If it is not booted
every day, you may have an old enough registry backup that you can use even
though more than five days have elapsed. Note that any registry changes
made after the date of the restored registry will be lost.
Ways of restoring the W98 registry include:
On the Start Menu, select Shut Down and Restart in MSDOS Mode. At the
Windows prompt, type: scanreg /restore and hit enter.
Boot to the boot menu by holding down either the ctrl or F8 key after the
ram count occurs on the boot screen. Select Command Prompt Only and at the
C: prompt, type: scanreg /restore and hit enter.
Boot with the W98 start up floppy disk--CDRom support doesn't matter. At
the A: prompt, type: C: and hit enter. At the C: prompt, type: CD
Windows\Command and hit enter. At the Command prompt, type: scanreg
/restore and hit enter.
Once the registry restore screen appears, select the date of the registry
that you wish to restore by highlighting it and then click enter. If you
see a registry named: Rbbad.cab, that is a copy of the registry that has
already been replaced.
(I haven't read that KB article, but the simplest way to turn on CD support
in DOS is probably just to boot from ['98 or later] a boot floppy - assuming
you've got one that is.)
Well, you could get at them; however, they're probably designed to be loaded
from Windows. You _might_ be lucky and they'll run from DOS, but I suspect
it's unlikely. (And if you do run them from Windows and they require a
restart, you've then got the problem of losing CD again during the restart -
unless you copy them to C: anyway.)
As someone else said, just putting a new HD in and installing XP to that,
then connecting the old HD back in (changing the link to slave if it's on
the same cable), will let you access your files no problem; or you could as
you said use floppies. You said you had the odd file over a floppy's worth -
no problem, there are lots of ways - there are certainly zipper utilities
that will run from DOS (in fact the zip format, and the software that makes
it, predates Windows), and with those you could zip the files across two or
more floppies.
