Windows 98 won't boot

computer was running defrag. thought it was finished. shut it down correctly. now realize no information on defrag results shown. when computer restarted windows 98 startup menu appeared saying windows has detected a registry configuration error. choose command prompt only and run scanreg. was told there was a corrupted file and name changed to dir00001. this happened repeatedly so i stopped the scanreg. after restarting computer many times i found out about scanreg/restore and scanreg/fix. restore just brings up screen where it says it's searching for system files. nothing else happens. fix looks at user.dat, it's ok then looks at system.dat and stops. couldn't find the system.dat file so i replaced it with the system.1st. tried to start in safe mode and get while initializing device vkd windows protection error. keyboard is working ok. tried to do a step by step boot. bootlog.txt, config.sys, himem.ss, dblbuff.sys, and ifshlp.sys are all ok. when it asks to load the windows graphical user interface get scandisk cannot read from the lst cluster on drive c, this cluster is either damaged or your system is not configured properly. then it asks to load all window drivers. windows 98 logo comes up and computer locks up. have run surface scan partially. when it's about 40% through get there is a damaged cluster. tell it to fix it. have already fixed 4 groups of clusters in a row. also the last 2 groups of clusters on drive c are already marked as bad. there is alot of information on this computer that i would like to save. don't have any disks or cds for this computer. it's a gateway e1800. it was giving me problems before freezing up or having bad clusters. have another older computer with windows 98. can i make a boot disk from it and use it? will it cause me to lose all my data? looked at the dir c and there are alot of files there including the dir00001 thru 68. there is also a sysbckup created the day after the crash. please help.