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Recovering from AOL install

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by pas2

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A client of mine installed AOL 5.0 on his Win98SE PC and then decided to remove AOL. Somehow he messed up enough Win98 system files that the PC wouldn't even boot up in safe mode. I tried to reinstall 98 by running setup from the CD, but the file copy took forever. After 50 minutes, with the copy progress still around 30%, I pulled the plug and decided to do a reformat and clean install. The clean install went fine, but I am wondering if anyone else has seen this problem (with the initial reinstall). Was there a way around it? If I had let the file copy run for hours and hours, would this have worked?

3 replies

by istmaj

It would have worked, I don't know what kind of system files your user deleted, but depending on that, it would have taken a while to copy the files. The way it sounds, you probably did the right thing by reformatting.
I have found that AOL is likea virus. I too had AOL 5.0 on my home pc and uninstalled. I found out that AOL clings to files that really should not have clinged too. I went through regedit, start/find/files/folders then used Norton cleansweep and the wipe info option and still didn't get all of AOL off my system!

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