Somehow my system automatically switched over to ms dos compatibility mode file system. At the same time, i've lost all my devices in the device manager, it's completely blank except for my computer icon and thats it. And my d drive (cd-rom) is not recognized anymore either. When I go into system properties (performance tab) i see this message: "drive a & c using ms dos compatibility mode file system, which reduces overall system performance". Every thing was working fine untill i started having problems with my internal modem. I then tried several times to re-install the driver for the modem and soon after is when i began having problems. I searched the windows help topics, which suggested that the possible cause was that an unknown driver was installed and being shared by more than one device. It also suggested that i go into config.sys or autoexecbat and locate the unknown driver and delete it. Well, i'm not that computer literate, so when i went into these two files i didn't really know what i was looking for or at. I couldn't tell which was the unknown driver to delete. It all looked the same. I'm using windows '98, how can i get out of the ms dos compatibility mode and back into my normal operating mode? And once i do this, will this bring back all my devices into the device manager and also recognize my d drive again or do i possibly have more than one problem here?, My system boots up all the way to my desk top, but right after i receive messages for certain programs that there is no "socket" installed (whatever that means). I can't use programs like real player, i've lost all audio on my system, and my printer isn't recognized either. Please help, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Sounds like real trouble...

First, try scanreg. Get to a boot menu during startup by pressing [F8] or hold down [Ctrl] and choose Command Prompt Only. At the C:\> prompt type
scanreg_/restore using a space where i Used the underscore ( _ ).

Choose a registry backup made before this happened.

In autoexec.bat and config.sys you can disable everything, usually Windows does not use them. Type rem and a space before each line, one at a time, save and reboot, then rem out another.

See if that helps and get back to us, maybe some of the others will have more suggestions.

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I really appreciate your help & response. I tried scanreg restore first, but unfortunately that didn't work even though it found an error free backup to restore from. Then I tried deleting everything in config.sys as you suggested, but to no avail. Although not sure I did it correctly. I clicked on start> find> typed in config.sys to find this file, then once it found it, I was asked what program to open it up with. I tried several & finally ended up using notepad since this was the only one that would allow me to type in text. I went through the procedure as you described, but with no luck. Did I do this correctly? Thanks in advance.