While trying to extract ebd.cab format .com so as to be able to format drive c I encountred th following message "general failure writing drive a" What does this mean? Is there hope for this old laptop to get a clean windows install?

If you 'really' want to format (it will wipe out everything on the drive), you can download a file that will create a bootable floppy diskette with format on it from www.bootdisk.com.

It might be a good idea to mention why you are formatting. There could be a better solution.

ok here's the background: this laptop was working fine until I attempted to use an mp3 player/flash drive with it.It then froze. Symptoms are that it will start up fine but the first attempt to open anything will freeze everything,reboot brings me back to the same point. so I did an over the top reinstall of windows 98se from a cd wich went fine but did not solve the problem. I suspect that there is a driver which is causing the problem so I am now attempting to do a clean install.The drive is partitioned with windows in c. When I run "format c: " I get "bad command or file name". So I tried " extract ebd.cab format.com " and I get "general failure writing drive a" . also worth mentioning is that this laptop has a modular drive so I am either cd or floppy but not both. my only boot disk is an oem recovery disc w/ windows 98se.

Assuming you can boot up OK with the 98 cd, do that. Then at the dos prompt type format c: and enter. When it's done type X:\setup and enter, where X: is the cdrom drive letter indicated when you booted up.

Next time this sort of thing happens, the first thing to try is restoring a backup of the Registry. It will effectively remove anything that you installed since the backup. You normally will have backups for the last 5 days. To accomplish this restore, boot to dos standalone and type: scanreg /restore