On my laptop Windows won't start anymore. The computer boots, but stops at the "welcome to windows98" window, but won't load it. I tried to restore a registry from a day and two days before with c:\scanreg /restore, but eventhough the restorage seemed to be successful, windows still wouldn't start. I tried to start windows in safe mode and failed as well. Then I started scandisk while still in ms-dos mode and it took about 3 hours to finish the programm during which I received several messages about errors in files and directories as well as file which use the same clusters. Once the programm was finished, scandisk had apparently fixed or deleted several directories, but windows still won't start. My gateway technical support told me that I would have to reinstall windows, but I have several important documents on my harddrive which I don't want to loose. They told me, that there is a way to copy all these files from the harddrive to floppy disks, being in DOS-mode using dos commands. However, they would not tell me how to do that. The harddrive has a c:\ and a d:\ partition. Is it possible to copy all files from c to d and reinstall windows on c from dos without loosing the data on d? What happens with long file names (many of my documents have those, including the IE favorites.) Can anyone help me?? I desperately need to rescue my files before reinstalling Windows!!

You shouldn't lose any documents if you just reinstall windows. You would lose your files if you formatted the drive.

reinstall windows without a format. When you get to the point where it asks you which directory to install to, rename it from the default WINDOWS to anything you like eg. Win,window. It will install a fresh OS. Back up all your important files when it restarts. Personally I would reformat afterwards and reinstall clean.(because you'll have to reinstall all your applications anyways)Make sure you have a start-up disk

Hi Claudia. If you follow Carl's advice, you will basically have 2 OS installed on your computer...one new one, and 1 corrupted one. The registry won't know where to look for apps, because everything points to the old, corrupted OS. I would do this instead: In DOS, navigate to C:\WINDOWS. Rename WIN.COM to WIN_OLD.COM (This will prevent Windows from booting to the corrupted OS) Reboot with a boot disk, and reinstall Windows on top of itself. Windows will suggest a directory such as C:\Windows.000. Click on Select a Different Directory and type C:\Windows (assuming that this is where you currently have it installed.) I just followed this procedure to install Win98SE over Win98, and when I was done, I only had lost one shortcut, which was easily replaced. All apps & data were fine and operable. Good luck. Dave