I have a year 2000 Del Dimension running Win 98SE. It was acting boggy and would ocassionally hang up, so I downloaded a freeware registry cleaner/defragger from ZDnet, which I promptly loaded and executed. [I totally forgot to kill the AVGfree AV program which I run!!!] The pc shutdown and rebooted into DOS, I think, and began to do a registry evaluation which it completed; then it began an evaluation--it hung at 1% complete on the progress bar in the status display. After 30 min I turned the computer off, and attempted to reboot. It booted back into the ?DOS? registry software and promptly hung again at the 1% progress level.---Is there any way to get it back to Windows98 without reloading the os? I have a Win 98 startup disc which I made when the computer was new; I also have the original Dell Win 98 software cd software. If I cannot recover to the original Win98 os, can I pull the hard drive and install it in another Win 98 machine and get to all the user files on the disc? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Nutgrower

Hi nutgrower, welcome to the PCHF.

After you see the white box with white writing in it when you turn the computer on, keep tapping the F8 button, which will give you a menu to boot from. You should be able to do a Step by Step confirmation mode, which will prompt you every single timesomething tries to load (it's alot)...but you'll be able to stop the regcleaner stopping, and will get into windows for you to disable it.

If that doesn't work - then yes, you can plug that hard drive into any other computer (running windows 98se or newer) and save all your data

Thanks GarHar for the quick response; I'll give it a try and see what happens!
Nutgrower

Hi welcome to PCHF another suggestion if it wrecked the registry restroe the backup to get it going like this

1.Start your computer, press and hold CTRL, and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Windows 98 Startup menu. If you are running Windows Me, start your computer with the startup disk.2.At the MS-DOS prompt, type cd\windows\command, and then press ENTER. Where windows is the name of the folder in which Windows is installed.

3.At the C: prompt, type scanreg /restore, and then press ENTER.4.Select the previous registry you want to restore, and then press ENTER.NOTE: A properly working registry has the word "Started" next to the date.

5.When you receive notification that you restored a properly working registry, press ENTER to restart your computer