Vigilante said:
If you have NTFS you can't use a 9x boot floppy, as it cannot access your NTFS partitions!
The Recovery Console can get you access to the repair folder and config folders.
Of course to most folks, the simple solution is to format but I don't believe in that, it has been 5 years since I did a complete re-format. The Recovery Console is nice but a big POS in my case, nothing I couldn't have done without, and I did not have it and could not make it available. However, nothing the RecCon could have done would have saved me.
I had NO explorer so no file control, no executing of anything except from the command-line, which is accessed via Ctrl-Alt-Del, then New Task... From there I could do cmd.exe, and regedit, and firefox worked, but without explorer, I couldn't download, or save, or do anything at all so long windows was in control, there was no file management except through cmd.exe, which still will NOT copy files that are IN use by windows.
I had no desktop and no taskbar, thou the icons showed, they did not respond. The taskbar did absolutely nothing, so all the cool tricks about Start > etc did not work. Oh, I forgot to mention, it would only boot in safe mode, thou lucky me it did boot to safe mode with networking so I had Internet, via Firefox and firefox only (I love that browser).
I had only user access, and since it has been 2-3 years since I installed this OS, I had no more memory of what the password was than John Doe has memory of how many square miles of planet Jupiter consists of. Although it was the same user I have always logged in as, it had no admin privileges even thou the account is set for this, that did not work.
The neat ntfs tricks didn't work, all it did was corrupt my SAM files, I am using Win XP Sp2 Pro and evidently most cheats/tricks are meant for Xp Home... Yes, and the clever trick of booting to Safe mode with command prompt or whatever only works with the password! Forget making a boot floppy or a boot cd, there is NO explorer, thus there is no formatting or anything else involving disk access or execution, except perhaps by using another OS that does NOT involve this HDD's version. Needless to say, the CD is outdated so that was out of the question (we know the warning, right?). Yes, you can slip-stream it, with no explorer there will be no making of boot disks.
So that 98 might be incapable of accessing all the drive and its folders I do not doubt, all I used it for was to make a directory and copy a few files. It worked for me, I am sharing the idea, is all... It is certainly no crazier than using a Unix OS to boot just because it HAS ntfs support, Unix is no closer to XP than Win98se, in that sense.
Thou I am awaiting results on the password recovery, because I lost all my favorites, all my settings/accounts/passwords/usernames/email filters/etc, and more than a few short-cuts need restoring and it sure would be nice to login as User again (I am now on as admin) but without passwords, none of this is possible.
But, I have all my files, and my windows works again.
The only thing that doesn't work is the cd-burner, but that's nothing new.
So, do as you please but there comes a time when all the nifty solutions do NOT work, and I am sorry but re-formatting would involve a week's work just to get back to basics... Mind you, I burn backups of important files to CD-Rom, so nothing is ever lost, but dumping gigs of CD files back onto a hard-drive is NOT a fast process.
