Deleting Win98 but keeping the data

[darkmatter]

I am at my wits end. Some way, some how my IE got fouled up. It began displaying DNS Error Pages for every page entered in the address bar. The ads and messages from Satan's ISP (Juno) came through fine and I could ping my own IP so I knew the connection is fine. I concluded that IE was messed up. I ran "repair" in IE. No good. So I reinstalled it. No good. I reinstalled Windows. No good. I deleted every trace of IE I could track down in Windows and the registry and then reinstalled it. No good. Same error. Juno tech support might as well be run by retarded garden slugs. They said my modem was bad or my phone line was bad or....anything other than something they were obligated to help with. I have since switched to a real ISP. I installed their software including a newer version of IE. No good. Same error. They did everything they could to help me but the problem persisted. They suggested what I knew would fix it all along; FORMAT!! No way dude! I got 28 gigs of irreplaceable data on there. OK, maybe most of it is just MP3's and pictures of the kids trying to drown the cat and papers I wrote for college too many years ago.... OK most of it's trash. Nonetheless, I don't want to part with it. I am now living out of a 5 year old 1.6 GB HDD. I can still access data from the messed up drive but it's a pain. I've bought an update CD to upgrade 98 FE to 98 SE but it didn't fix the problem either.
What I need to know how to do is completely delete and replace at least IE. But since Mr. Gates tied IE so close to the OS there's no way to root out every tendril of IE is there? Failing that, can I delete Windows 98 FE but preserve the data? What happens if I delete the Windows directory from DOS?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[girish]

well, this is when a partition helps.

you could well save your data to the other partition and format c drive happily.

anyway, you could delete the entire windows directory and it could work quite fine, just one problem.

a fair amount of your data is still in the windows directory! your mailbox if you use Outlook Express for your mails, your bookmarks, your fonts and your personal settings.

save a copy of desktop, fonts, favorites and application data folders in a directory outside windows.

then get into safe mode DOS and delete the windows directory. it would take hell lot of a time!

but before that, you could try using a old version of your registry, exactly the one before you started having such problems.

boot into DOS mode (not safe DOS, you need himem) and run "scanreg", on the menu choose backups and you can browse through old registry backups date stamped! you could choose any of them, preferably the one you dint have any problems with.

or else get a spare hard disk from a friend, backup your data and partition the disk.

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

 

[blah]

he does not even have to deal with DOS, he said that he is using the older drive right now, so just connect your big one as a slave, save your stuff as <font color=blue>girish</font color=blue> said, delete Windows, Program Files (etc. Windows related) folders and ALL files on the root, shut PC down, connect it back as a master, and happily set the Windows up again with all your stuff there. After defrag it to put Windows to the front of the drive space.

Have fun unda da sun.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

 

[darkmatter]

I currently have my main drive set as slave to the old 1.6 gb drive. I can still boot into that drive via the bios. If I do delete Windows on what was the main drive and reinstall, will Windows reinstall in the "hole" left from the deleting of the previous installation or will it overwrite some of the data? It's an OEM version (expects a blank drive). If it doesn't overwrite, will I have to reintegrate all of the applications? If so, how do I get the OS hooked up to recognize and organize those folders?