Funky Windows install problems

[Breadfan]

So this guy at work brought me his computer today. Its a CompUSA Home Series PC, a 450mhz PIII with 64mb of RAM and A Voodoo3 2000 AGP.

Funny as hell: The cooling on the PIII is only a passive heat sink! HA! Gets VERY hot too. Theres 1 case fan, an exhaust fan at the back fo the case, but nothing blowing on the passive heatsink. Suffice to say that atleast while I'm working on it, theres a spare 92mm Sunon high output blowing on it...heheh now its cold to the touch :)

Anyway, he downloaded something from mIRC that took out most of his Windows system files, like win.com, himem.sys, and various vxd's. So I figure thats nothing a quick reinstall can't fix.

Only problem is, it hangs up during the install. When its "preparing the install wizard" it locks up at 100%. It did this for me in 3 differen't copies of Windows: Win98, Win98SE, and WinME.

Upon further inspection I saw theres also a windows.000 dir, which means he tried to reinstall windows in a different dir, windows.000 is the default second windows dir microsoft creates....

So I did the best I could to wipe the files outta these directories, but I'm doing it through dos which sucks.

At anyrate, it hasn't helped yet, I still get my lockup. It doesn't matter if I use a boot disk or not.

I'm pulling the drive out now, and I'm gonna put it in my system and run Norton antivirus on it, and then I'm gonna delete all the files I need to through windows, and maybe this will help. Theres too many subdirectories in the windows folder that it would take me all day to del the files from them and remove them in dos.

So hopefully that'll help, but if it doesn't then I'm outta ideas. He's got a TON of files on there, and he's a cool dude so I'm not up for just wiping the drive if I don't have too. But I've tried most everything I can think of, so if it doesn't work after I put the drive in my comp, anyone got any more ideas?

Thanks!
Mike

[JigPu]

You got enough space on your HD to do a partial backup of his? If you absolutely format the HD to get Windows to work, and you don't want to kill all of his files, call him over and backup what he wants to keep onto your HD. If they are programs, it might cause a few issues with the registry if you back them up and then restore them (not using the instaler). Hopefully he still has the CDs (or disks :D ) for the programs to reinstall. MP3s and the like should be fine though. You could even backup the directories the programs are stored in and after installing the programs, copy the backuped directories over the installed directories.

Had to reinstall windows and everything a while back, had a second HD and backed up what I wanted (music, saved games, programs not using an installer, ect.) After a format and reinstall, everything worked great (and my HD had more room after killing all the junk files)

Hope this will help...
JigPu

[Smizack]

I had the same kind of problem installing Win ME the first time.
I found out the problem was that I used a Win 98 boot disk to FDISK and Format and when I tried to install ME, after the initial loading to 100% and it would lock up. Sometime it went to DOS and gave me a stack fault error.
But anyway, I just FDISK'ed and re formatted with a WIn ME boot disk and it worked fine.
Hope this helps.

[thefly]

Could there be something in the boot sector?

Possible damage?


try

fdisk /mbr


Also windows system file checker can be useful in those cases. Will replace any lost windows filez from the cd back to hd.

[Ridenow]

Just a thought and probably unrelated- Did you disable the virus protection in the BIOS, if it has it?

[Breadfan]

Check out my other thread about this...

Virus protection isn't on in the BIOS, infact I don't think it has it. The MBR seems fine, I scanned it with Norton and it boots up no problem....

But check out the other thread.

Mike