Win98se & Win2000 on old Dell laptop problem

[halo71]

My friend bought a Dell laptop for his 13 year old daughter (dont know model) that had 98se on it. After about 4 months it came up on boot and said "operating system not found". So he had his 2000 disc that he tried to install over 98se and had issues. He brought the laptop to me and somehow I managed to get 98se working again. But now upon boot up you have about 3 seconds to choose from Win2000 or 98se. If you dont do anything it will try to boot into Win2000 and fail, just lock up. Works okay if you choose 98se though. Although i think the hardrive is going out, the reason it couldnt find the OS in the first place.

I guess my question is, how to remove the 2000 files etc so it will boot automatically into 98se and not give you the OS option to choose??

 

[alidabiri]

i know in win-xp-pro you can run this command from start/run or in dos:
osuninst.exe
this command will uninstall xp. you may see if this file exists in your pc to uninstall win2000

 

[halo71]

i will see if that file is in that laptop of my friends. I just tried that command on a Win2000 box here at work and it didnt find that file.

 

[alidabiri]

if that doesn't work, try add/remove in control panel to remove win2000. if win2000 doesn't show up in add/remove programs. edit sysoc.ini file using text editor. you will see win2000 with a line line this:
msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7

take out "hide" so that the line will look like this ........msmsgs.inf,,7
note that there are no spaces between the two commas.
this will make any "hidden" program to show up in add/remove program panel.

 

[halo71]

Okay, thanks....I will try that the next time I go over to his house.