yes I know this is an oldie puter. it's my girlfriends puter, but anyway her printer stoped working the other day, so I took a peek at her settings ECT. I realized she had no anti virus software on it at all. so I bought her a norton 2003 and installed it. she used the puter a couple of times after that, and the tried booting yesterday----uh oh no go. she gets a " bad sector " message and no boot. I tried safe mode and it didn't even respond. any advice greatly appreciated. and of course I can't tell if the printer works now or not. any advice very appreciated. charlie

charlie, boot with a win98se boot disk, type in c:\scanreg/restore[note the forward slash] in the menu, choose the earliest date the computer ran correctly. then,after reboot, remove the printer drivers from the printer icon, reboot,, let windows reinstall on reboot

kjan: You didn't respond to the other post where you offered this solution to files that were deleted. But, can you please explain how you think a registry restore is going to fix a bad sector? Charlie: Try booting to a command prompt, or if necessary, boot with a boot disk and then run Scandisk /Surface from the prompt. This should detect and mark the cluster as bad. The question is whether there is any data/operating system code living there that will be completely recovered.

Whitphil... In the interest of fairness, I thought I would ask if you possibly meant This Post where I suggested scanreg /restore in error? Just like see credit where credit's due and so forth. Hate to see someone else get blame for my mistake. Thanks....

To replace the system files you run the SYS program (sys c)after booting with the win98 bootdisk. The SYS program copies the IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM files to the hard drive. The first two have to be written to the system area of the hard drive, usually track zero. If this area is damaged, you will get an error message. If the Sys program doesn't successfully replace your boot file (system files), your next step is usually to replace the hard drive. You can try to correct the problem by reformatting the hard drive. However, in my experience, once the boot sectors are damaged, the drive is usually unusable as a primary drive. If this works for you do scandisk regularly and check for new and more frequent errors, hd noise (irregular noise...banging skipping repetitive chatter)this is a good indication that your hard drive is on its way out!

Solo... I think that this is the post referred to. Scanreg is a useful tool - but it's not a cureall. Definitely scan the disk for errors with scandisk - if they are 'track 0' errors, might not have much success. If the errors can be repaired, as mentioned, might need to 'sys' the hard drive to get it to boot.

Good idea jboy!I think jo already said that tho...