windows nightmare reinstall

[jollygyent]

can i reinstall win 98 over my exsisting win98 which has become unstable. i wish to keep my documents (not delete them) but reinstall win98 over unstable. i did this b4 in the past but the help i had from an old work friend who has moved away is not available. any advice thanx.

[suetoo]

You can try that. It worked for me, but sometimes if the problem is a .dll file, and it's left on there, it might interfere. If your hard drive is large enough, you can rename your windows directory, and when you reinstall, reinstall to a new directory. That will work too

[Paleo Pete]

Best thing to do would be copy the documents to floppies in DOS, then do a full format/install. Overinstalling often causes more problems than it can ever solve.

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

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[the diff]

Paleo, you said...

> Best thing to do would be copy the documents to floppies in DOS.

I'm curious why in DOS?

[Paleo Pete]

Because the original post said Windows is unstable. If that means totally or almost unusable, doing it in DOS would be necessary. If the system is unstable and you're worried about the instability possibly corrupting files, do it in DOS...all in all it would be a nuisance, but the best way to go with an unstable system.

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Soon as I come up with all the answers...they change the questions!!

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[ReddDogg]

Well, if windows is giving you oodles of trouble, then go to dos and copy the stuff. If you can run windows, then do it from there. But the best thing to do, is backup your stuff, and then repartition your hard drive with 2 logical drives, C: drive being 1-2 gigs and enough for windows directory, and D: drive being where you store all your files and stuff, then when you need to reinstall windows, you don't lose any of your documents.

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Joe Redd
MCP