metallibloke
Senior member
Just thought I'd share this with everyone, as this sort of question is common in these forums. This might not work for everyone, hell, I didnt think it would work for me. Sort of went into it fearing the worst and prepared backups just in case. Heres my story:
My setup is a dual boot of XP Pro and W98SE, w98 on C, XP on D, and an E partition for general stuff. Last week I downloaded the new nVidia 29.42 drivers and thought I'd install them over the weekend. It was the installation of these drivers that caused W98 to break, so much so, that I couldnt even get into safe mode (but I'll save that story for another thread).
Anyway, as there wasnt really that much on my W98 partition, only a couple of games that wont run in XP, I decided to reinstall W98. I didnt want to just do it over the top, as I wanted a clean install. Naturally formatting would be the option, but that would stop XP from booting, causing me more hassle. So I booted into XP and started deleting stuff from the C drive.
I deleted pretty much everything (Windows, Program Files etc.) except for a directory called "System Volume Information", and the contents of the root directory, as this contained stuff XP had put there. Then I booted to a floppy and proceeded to reinstall W98, thinking I'd have to repair the mbr to make XP boot again. I was going to use the "setup /ntldr" option that I had seen in the FAQs but forgot until setup was already underway. However, something was clever enough to just leave the mbr alone, and make the W98 option in boot.ini the default, meaning everything booted fine. When I looked at the contents of C, there were a few duplicate files, and slightly renamed files, like autoexec.old, and msdos.--- , So i took a backup of them and moved them to a temporary directory just to keep things tidy, and have them handy if anything complained. The only main consequence of all this is that W98 is now the default in boot.ini, when before it was xp, but thats easily rectified.
Ok, some of you are probably thinking "yep, knew about that already", well, i didnt, or "ah, he was just lucky", well maybe. I was pretty chuffed when everything turned out ok. So big grin --> 😀
My setup is a dual boot of XP Pro and W98SE, w98 on C, XP on D, and an E partition for general stuff. Last week I downloaded the new nVidia 29.42 drivers and thought I'd install them over the weekend. It was the installation of these drivers that caused W98 to break, so much so, that I couldnt even get into safe mode (but I'll save that story for another thread).
Anyway, as there wasnt really that much on my W98 partition, only a couple of games that wont run in XP, I decided to reinstall W98. I didnt want to just do it over the top, as I wanted a clean install. Naturally formatting would be the option, but that would stop XP from booting, causing me more hassle. So I booted into XP and started deleting stuff from the C drive.
I deleted pretty much everything (Windows, Program Files etc.) except for a directory called "System Volume Information", and the contents of the root directory, as this contained stuff XP had put there. Then I booted to a floppy and proceeded to reinstall W98, thinking I'd have to repair the mbr to make XP boot again. I was going to use the "setup /ntldr" option that I had seen in the FAQs but forgot until setup was already underway. However, something was clever enough to just leave the mbr alone, and make the W98 option in boot.ini the default, meaning everything booted fine. When I looked at the contents of C, there were a few duplicate files, and slightly renamed files, like autoexec.old, and msdos.--- , So i took a backup of them and moved them to a temporary directory just to keep things tidy, and have them handy if anything complained. The only main consequence of all this is that W98 is now the default in boot.ini, when before it was xp, but thats easily rectified.
Ok, some of you are probably thinking "yep, knew about that already", well, i didnt, or "ah, he was just lucky", well maybe. I was pretty chuffed when everything turned out ok. So big grin --> 😀
