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Win98 setup problems

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by dthaley

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I have encountered a strange problem. I attempted to run win 98 setup and was halted by a message stating that a previous install was already in progress. I ask the owner and found they had tried to run the win98 se update disk after a networking problem where they deleted all of networking components. After rebooting to reload the networking windows responded saying they needed to run setup. They did but quit at the point where windows wanted to reboot unsure whether windows was about to reformat and destroy their data. I created a boot disk, booted windows, deleted deleted win.com and attempted to re-run setup. All went as planned until it said windows is getting ready to run for the first time and then it restores the registry with all the problems I went to stop. Can you tell me what file(s) or trigger(s) that tell windows that its in an install mode? What files are changed during the initial setup run? Thanks, Terry

5 replies

by thechas

If your goal is a cleaned up install, just delete the registry and system files.
I delete all files in the root folder of the boot drive, and most of the system files with the OS version date.

All you realy need to do, is clean out the C:\folder, and delete system.dat, win.ini, sys.ini from the Windows folders

You will have to re-install all applications to get them "registered", but that is the "simplist" way to remove a corrupt registry.

Chas

by randalbin

The files in question are setup.log, netsetup.log and any other log files that might be present. All should be in the root directory.

To prevent registry restoration deltree the windows directory from the dos prompt. After all of this is complete you should be able to complete your new install.

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