Strange windows 98 boot problem

[daveymac]

I have a dell GX240 that will not boot into windows or into safe mode
It has windows 98 on with the novell netware client

the machine crashed while alogin was being attempted, on reboot the machine throws up various dll files being missing ( although they are present)

the strange thing is the error message boxes appear normal except for that the line of text saying "" File msvcrt.dll is missing " being struck through

\The missing dlls include a novell file , msvcrt.dll, multprot and then finally after clearing all the error messages MPREXE ends up not responding and the desktop stays blank

The machine will not boot in safe mode and come up with an error relating to explorer.exe and then locks up

If possible i dont want to format this machine as there is a lot of data on the machine that i need to retain, i want to try and recover it to a bootable system

I have also tried replacing the memory to see if that was the problem but the error still occurs

any help would be appreciated

thanks

[Murf]

Welcome to CTH

Have you tried a registry repair????
Instead of Safe Mode select Safe Mode Command Prompt then type the following:

scanreg /restore and press Enter.

Choose which backup to restore. You should have a choice of registry backups from the last five days the system successfully booted.

Choose one before this happened

[Vittra]

Any .dll files your machine reports as missing can be downloaded and replaced by visiting here. Downloads are free and registration is not required. Perhaps replacing the .dll files will solve the .exe files that choose to stop responding.

[daveymac]

murf

i have already tried scanreg /restore and none of the previous backups resolve the problem

gonna try to replace the dll files even though they are already exist today