Thanx for the update Karin. Sound like you had a downloader. Downloaders tend to download more and more malware as it's connected to the internet. Must have been a nasty one to disable your AV and FW.

Ok, I have now finally rescued what was to be rescued to another laptop. The hard disk is now ready to be fixed and all of what is left there, may go.
A possible problem when getting it to boot into windows again is that I have changed rights and ownerships to the administrator of the harddisk I milked the files to be saved into...? Should I hook the harddisk back to this working laptop and change back rights and ownership to Creator Owner before proceeding?
I need be walked through the next stages as I am TOTALLY blank on how to do it.
The original CD is here (but CDROM is so dead..), a copy of the CD is on a USB drive (but it won´t boot from USB), a floppy set of Microsofts boot up floppies but XP professional, my language version, is here (but they don´t work because they nag for the CD when all six are loaded). A folder with a copy of the installation CD has also been placed on the hard disk, in a folder i named "CDROM". Opening in NTFStoDOS, pointing to this folder and and typing winnt.exe does open winnt.exe...but then the installation program asks for "smartdrive".
So, what do I do now?

Taking he oppotunity to wish everbody a happy new year!

You don't really need to change the permissions back to be honest, I won't cause any problems as long as no permissions have been removed. If your doing a completely new install, the disk would be wiped in any case. I don't know if your planning to try a repair first?

OK, download this: http://www.dehning.com/download/util...s/boot98sc.exe
^ this will allow you to create a single startup disk. When you use it, it will take you straight to the command prompt. It comes with smartdrv, so you can should be able to start it by simply typing smartdrv followed by C:\CDROM\i386\winnt.exe

I tried but it only lists a number of operations, starting with
/X disables write-behind caching for all drives
etcetc
ends with /B buffersize specifiesthe size of the read-ahead buffer

then when i tried to type ONLY the last
C:\CDROM\i386\winnt.exe
...and get "invalid drive specification"

I am more confused than ever... I now wonder if the drive letter for the harddisk has been changed and, if so, what it might be. I tried type D and got the same message (anyway, i think that would just point to the memory allocation part of the harddisk, wouldn´t it?). E doesn´t work, either.

Checked BIOS and yes, the hardisk is recognized as it should be, set as 2nd boot option (i had previously moved down the CDROM as it doesn´t work, anyway)

Dang! C is the RAM drive, 2 mb. That´s the only thing that shows up when i inserted the NTFSforDOS floppy to check what´s up. The rest of the hard disk has become invisible somehow. What do I do now?

Use: smartdrv.exe /q

NTFS cant read FAT32 and FAT32 cant read NTFS. If the drive is formatted in NTFS then you should use the NTFS DOS boot disk, but you may have difficulty starting Setup properly from here. If the drive is formatted in FAT32 then you should use the Windows 98 boot disk I provided.