Windows directory corruption?

[Jeff444]

AMD K6-2/400 win98, 64mb RAM, and recently it has started to have trouble loading files to start windows, and has been getting blue screens of death. Just now, when I tried to start it up, it wouldn't go, couldn't find win.com. I checked the hd, and most of the files seem ok, except for the Windows directory. It has four files. The first three are made of symbols and zero-length, but the fourth one is titled x and apparently is somewhere near 2gb or so. Is this a virus? Bad HD? Windows incompatibility? I'd never heard of this happening before besides one time I messed up with fdisk, but fdisk was not involved in this catastrophe. I have no idea what to do with this one...

 

[Fallen Kell]

Sounds like a virus or you were hacked.

What I would do is this:
Boot up from a good old Win98 Boot Floppy.
Re-install Win98 into the current c:\windows dir.
Install Norton Antivirus (or MacAfee whatever) and download the latest virus definitions. Run a sweep of the system and see if it picks up anything.

Next you need to either use a program like partition magic or the like that will go through your hardrive and reset all the links and recreate the registry for the software. Or you may need to reinstall many of the applications that you were using. You shouldn't need to worry about backing up the data onto floppy or anything like that, just move saved files and such from their current locations into temp foldes in C:\windows\desktop or something like that so that after reinstalling the software you can just place the files back into their origional folders and you should be able to run them again without losing your data.

 

[Jeff444]

Thank you, Fallen Kell