I'm really in need of some advice after a massive problem I've just encountered.... (ALSO, This is the 1st time I've used this site so if I'm posting in the wrong forum please forgive me BUT then please suggest where I could an answer to this problem)

Here's the situation

My wife runs a machine with a removable bootable disk (in one
of those slide out trays) She has 3 disks:
· Win98SE for low end use; 20Gig
· Win2k for Web development use; 40Gig and
· WinXP for .NET experimentation 40Gig

The Motherboard failed and we went for a budget replacement solution with a new ECS K7S5A motherboard and AMD XP1600 CPU (still using the old SD RAM).

After a lot of CD Rom swapping Win98 came back to life but BOTH Win2k and WinXP failed very early on in the bootup process with dire warnings (sorry I don't have exact text at the moment but could get it if required) saying there may have been virus corruptions or the HW may have been changed.

Neither 2K or XP even get to the point of trying to build new driver files before they throw in the towel......

Nuking the XP disk is not too big of a problem but the Win2K setup has a "LOT" invested into it and we really do need to recover it.

Where do I start or where do I go to get the information I need

Thanks


Scooter

I have a K7S5A and use Win2k. You should do a recovery with your Win2k CD. It will try to reinstall your OS without killing your data. I have only done this 1 time so I am not an expert at it but it did work.

best you can try to do is come up in safe mode and delete as many drivers as you can from the dev mgr. Then see if you can come up normally. If not, a reinstall is the only other option. It's not so bad - I actually prefer it. Just back up all the important data files.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

Croaker Your response is the first bit of hope on the horizon I've seen. How do we initiate the recovery???

Do I try to boot from the win2K CD????

Scooter

first thing you do is when you start Win2k hit F8 and try safe mode. Win2k has 3 safe mode options this may let you copy files to disk or reinstall drivers. Second try the recovery. Boot from the Win2000 CD when it askes is you want to install answer yes. It will ask if you want a full install or a repair. you want repair("R" ). Then choose fast repair. You could also make the floppy boot disks it takes 4 disks the tool to do so is on the Win2000 CD.

If you can not loose this data I would get a Win 2000 book to help you. I got a $50.00 book on sale when Win xp came out for $19. Many book stores still have win 2000 book on sale.