What's the right way to resurrect Win98?

[BCinSC]

Friend's old Gateway system with first edition of Win98 konked out over weekend. They tried to use restore CD before calling me and things went from bad to worse. Windows will now only start in safe mode. Bootlog.txt show normal start dies at loading IFSHLP.SYS. Tried booting to command prompt only and run ScanReg /restore, but prior versions of registry seem hosed, too. What to do to salvage installed programs and data?

 

[jackschmittusa]

If they ran the restore cd, it at least reformatted the hd, maybe even repartitioned it. The original programs are on the cd still, any others are not recoverable from a hard drive anyway. It could prove really tough to recover any data.

 

[BCinSC]

Well, restore seems to have failed, probably because they ran it from within windows instead of booting to it. Allegedly it was just reinstalling hardware drivers, but the user isn't overly clear exactly what happened.

 

[LatinJones]

Try an inplace upgrade maybe?

 

[tiap]

You said you can start in safe mode; so retreiving the data should be no problem. Programs are another issue, but don't they have the original install disks. Some gateways came with the os on a hidden partition, some shipped with an os disk and a restore disk and some had a utility call goback. Check to see what they had.
In any case gateway is a PITA

 

[BCinSC]

Don't think you can upgrade to same version.

Have original install CDs with restore and OS