Win 98SE Reinstall Questions

[McDillon]

Hi Newbie here. Sure am glad I found this place!

I'll try to make a long story short...

I'm running Win 98SE on two HD's. My primary HD is 60 gig (installed June 2003) and is a mirror image of my 20 gig secondary HD (which used to be my main drive. I attempted to install a new ATI Radeon 7000 video card this weekend but I forgot to turn off Zone Alarm and Norton Antivirus when I did so and somehow the 60 gig drive got messed up. I can only get to just past the Windows screen, even in Safe Mode, and then it goes no farther. The Explorer bar flashes on for a second and disappears. Nothing happens past that point.

I switched my drive cables around, reinstalled the old 3d Navigator card and I've rebooted on the 20 gig drive and am running fine. I can view the entire contents of the 60 gig HD via Windows Explorer, showing as "D" drive.

I have updated my Award BIOS and it didn't help much other than now the screen colors are a little better when using the 60 gig drive.

After talking to ATI Tech Support, since I can't even boot the 60 gig drive into Safe Mode, they said I need to reinstall 98SE on that drive.

So...

Can I reinstall 98SE on the 60 gig drive WITHOUT doing a complete format? I have 6 months worth of system/program updates that I'd much prefer to not have to track down again if I can avoid it.

If I can reinstall without reformatting, what is the procedure for doing so?

Btw, both HD's are partitioned into 2 equal partitions, so they are C & E, and D & F. My E and F drives are my "My Documents" drives. Those have been backed up to each other so that's not an issue. The issue is that I'm sure I have differences in my C and D drives to some extent.

I did download the Win 98SE OEM and 98SE Custom boot programs from bootdisk.com. Which one should I use as a boot disk?

Thanks!

[McDillon]

OK, I've done a "reinstall" of 98SE. A number of things got hosed up...

- Display was set to 640x480 and didn't want to correct when I changed it back to 1024x768. After a half dozen attempts and reboots it works. Have no idea why it didn't.

- Zone Alarm is hosed on that drive and won't let me connect, uninstall, or reinstall. Haven't figured that one out yet. I get an error message saying "Validation Failed for: c:\windows\system\vsutil.dll" even though I can see the file in the system folder. Any ideas?

- Had to uninstall Norton AV and that took 3 attempts. Now have to reinstall it on that drive.

- Windows Explorer is funky. It wouldn't show two panes until I rebooted three times and it still doesn't act right.

Why did we ever let Bill Gates take over the world with products that never work right consistently???

[Murf]

Possible solution #1 If you get a Validation failed message, then either some certificates are messed up or else the security files need to be updated. These do *NOT* get updated with Windows updates. They only get updated with IE updates, so that should be your next step.


Possible solution #2: Recent versions of ZoneAlarm products check many files and system security certificates, in order to provide the best possible security for your system. Sometimes these can get corrupted (by a virus or trojan, maybe a system crash, or a corrupt installation or upgrade of Internet Explorer/IE, etc). When you see this message, one or more security certificates are most likely damaged.

[McDillon]

I've really been through the ringer now.

I had the 20 gig drive running yesterday, connected to the Internet. Tried to run a defrag last night and failed to do a scan disk like I normally do. Defrag stopped due to a bad sector. Ever since then it's been hosed. Tried to do everything thus far and although I've got it booted up, can't connect to the Internet, NAV files are hosed again also. I did do a manual uninstall and then reinstalled ZA, but it looks like I might have to do it again.

If I can't get to the Internet I can't update IE to fix the certificates...or can I???

I'm running on the laptop thank goodness, but both drives on the desktop are giving me fits. All I want to do is get it stable so I can update to XP, etc. I also need to get it connected to set up my home network so I can transfer files, although I guess the next option is a direct serial connection between the PC and laptop like the good ol' days, eh?

Any suggestions?

Thanks.