Windows install prob

[tony draper]

Got a strange prob witha hard disk here, its got a corrupted win 98 instal, it boots into safe mode only, it appears to give me no comms ports or other disk drives ie I have no floppy or cd rom.
I have it installed as a slave at the mo, but i like to keep a disk as a spare with a good windows instal on it.
Is it possible to copy all the files and foldes from the windows 98 CD and run set up on it?
I dont want to have to format this disk as its got lots of stuff on it I want to keep
I have copied most of the important files across to the other hard disc, but I would like to reload windows onto the duff disc and keep it as it is.
So basicly i want to reload windows over the top of the duff operating system, but i have niether a floppy or a cd rom drive when it is installed as master.
Any idea's ?

Dont ask me how it happened its a long story
:(

[ORAC]

Delete the old Windows on the drive.
Copy the contents of the Win 98 CD to a root directory named Win98.
Copy the basic DOS system files to the disk so it will boot or make a DOS boot floppy.
Make it the master and reboot.
CD to the Win98 directory.
Run setup.

[tony draper]

thanks ORAC, got me stumped this one has, never come across this before.
The disk boots as master ok but only in safe mode, I dont have to press f8 it boots straight into safe mode, weird.

[ORAC]

Make sure you delete the Win 98 system files in the root as well as the Windows directory.

[fobotcso]

Tony, what ORAC is saying should work; you'll have to get rid of any autoexec.bat and config.sys files from the old setup. There is a neat DOS program that Dell gave me called deltree.exe for the express purpose of getting rid of a corrupt Windows setup. It deletes a Directory (eg Windows) and its tree of sub-directories. (Hence the name deltree). It allows a clean install of Windows without formatting the HD.

But don't imagine that everything is going to be as it was before when you've rebuilt Windows 98. None of the currently installed programs will work because you will have an absolutely clean Registry. You are going to have to re-install all your Applications.

Your data should remain intact, however.

[tony draper]

Yes I am familier with dos used it for years,I was the last person in the UK to change over to windows ;)

[P.Pilcher]

No you weren't - I was!

[Engineer]

Windows what's that then You mean that my DOS 6.22 can be upgraded :p