Win98 problems - repair/reinstall?

[scotiawhiskers]

A friend of mine has recently had her mobo fried by a friend cleaning it with a dustbuster. :dead: She has acquired an Athlon 1Ghz/Gigabyte GA 7ZXE PC from a colleague at work to replace it.
Both have a single HDD and run Win 98. She wanted to use her drive as the system drive as it has all her data and programs, settings etc on it and use the one from the other PC just as storage. I said no problem and I could set it up for her. Should just be a case of setting the existing HDD as master on IDE2 with the CDR/W as slave and her HDD as master on IDE1 I assumed.

Problems
1) Her win98 refuses to boot - says there is a corrupted file in IOS or low on memory (1Gb free on the partition so not memory). Press any key and it just reboots.
2) The other HDD win98 boots but is has messages saying VREDIR.VXD is missing, followed by DFS.VXD is missing Then a warning that msnp32.dll is not available. Once booted there is another message about dll libraries 1-287, click on OK and all programs seem to work OK.

However we are unable to trace the .exe for her internet connection, or to format any of the existing partitions on the HDD which was in the computer - just get a message saying that format X: could not be completed because the drive is in use. Is it possible to run the win98SE setup disk to repair an existing installation (as with XP) or does it have to be completely re-installed?
Is there a best way to do this? She has other programs on her win98 partition which she doesn't want to lose - would it render them unuseable? Would it wipe them out completely?

As you may guess I am a bit lost here - I can play with XP Ok but am unfamiliar with 98 - prefer hardware to software! :knock:

Thanks for any help - even someone who knows where there is a guide to what I need would be brilliant.

 

[Tarkus]

the problem is her drive has drivers for her old motherboard and won't work with the new motherboard. Best solution is to copy ALL her stuff(documents, bookmarks addressbooks, if enough room just copy every folder and even hidden folders) onto the slower of the two drives(usually the smaller one) and do a clean windows install on the faster drive and then reinstall her apps on the new windows, then once she is sure everything is there, then reformat the slower drive.

 

[andygibbs]

Problem 2

The problem that you listed as 2.) is associated with networking. Is the computer linked to a network? I encountered some of the same problems when trying to connect my win 98 pc to my home network. Do you still have the win 98 disc?-this may be needed .