Yesterday the power went out while I was burning a cd with nero. When I restarted it, it told me to reinstall windows. I keep the the win98 folder on my c:\ for just this purpose. I get to "nitializing driver d" and "now setting up your hardware and any plug and play..." when I get "error loadin explorer.exe you must reinstall windows". I don't know what to do... obviously I can't reinstall windows the way I usually do. Right now I'm running a virus check and frantically trying to remember useful dos commands. please help.

Try this. Put your win 98 bootdisk in and boot up. When asked choose load without cdrom support. Then at the prompt type scanreg \restore. You should have the option to restore the computer to a date before the problem. Secondly, try smae process as above but but at the prompt type fdisk/mbr. Then remove the disk and reboot. Good luck. You can also reinstall windows 98 with the bootdisk and the win 98 cdrom without loosing any info.

tried all 3 of the options and it still hangs up at "setting up hardware" in the installation process. More suggestions please.

If you have ever before reinstalled Windows with the current configuration, disregard the suggestion below. It may help if you disable Plug & Play in your BIOS, there probably is a piece of hardware in your computer which isn't fully P&P compatible. Or it could be so new that Windows 98 doesn't know what it is and what to do with it. You'll need to load the drivers later on, after Windows is finished with the setup (after about 3 reboots). Good luck! Greetz from The Netherlands, The Count

yeah, I regularly reinstall windows. I'm wondering if this is a virus... ran Norton, but it found nothing. After the error loading explorer message there is another box the says there is an error in runonce.exe. I've copied fresh copies of: runonce.exe, msgsrv32.exe, COMCTL32.DLL, SPOOL32.exe & SHELL32.DLL. Maybe its a case of corrupted file? trying to install win98 as I type. I'm worried that its a hardware problem. Could the power outage fried a stick of ram or, god forbid, my hard drive?

recoping files worked! thanks your help!