I have a Gateway Computer. It has a 14 GB hard drive & 256 MB memory. I was going to sell it & was told that I need to make sure all of my information was erased for good. I installed a program called Sure Delete and deleted everything by over writing the files 2 or 3 times. I have tried to reinstall the OS, but my Gateway Restoration cd is scratched & the CD player does not recognize it. Then I got my husband's Windows 98SE disk & tried installing it with that. It runs scandisk before it will install Windows 98SE. It comes up with the error message "Files In Directory Are Damaged & Unusable". Then it goes trough the act of fixing the problem, but I have to click on button that says fix it for every problem & error. I have to manually do this for every error. Then it says that it has recovered lost clusters. After awhile it says that it cannot save any more lost clusters & says to delete some of the files from Windows Scandisk, but it will not allow me to do this. It also gives me the error message "There are no DOS files". Therefore, I cannot do anything from the DOS screen & even if I could do anything I would not know what to type in the command line. I have had very little experience with the DOS program. Please help me! Thank you for your time in this matter and I hope God blesses you and your family!

http://www.killdisk.com

Boot up with a 98 bootdisk. Run fdisk and delete all the partitions on the drive. Reboot and run fdisk again and create a primary dos partition. For simplicity just have the partition use all the space. Reboot and format the drive. Then do the 98 installation.

yea, the "Sure Delete" program was unnecessary. If you're concerned that your files may be recovered, use killdisk, then use the Win98 boot floppy as explained by DAVEINCAPS. If you don't have one, you're probably gonna need one to install the OS anyway. Download the file used to create a boot floppy here: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm And here's a little "heads up"...if you use the above boot floppy to install Win98, the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive will be R