Hello Wayne -

 WC> Winblows just nuked my hard drive to the point I got the
 WC> prompt "no operating system found."

It's a good idea to completely shut down and reboot W9x every
24 hours. :-)

 WC> All I did was a clean shutdown and turned the box on again
 WC> after installing the last much talked about critical update
 WC> that was supposed to halt unauthorized intrusion through
 WC> a gapping security hole.

I tried to install just the first update to W2K and it totally
trashed my system.  I've not tied again and don't intend to.
I seriously doubt the _need_ for most of the so-called 'updates'.

 WC> EBD gave no help at all and even LiLo got clobbered :-(
 WC> CMOS wouldn't detect the hard drive either.

Sounds like either a power supply problem or over heating to me.

 WC> But just before I gave up I entered the proper figures into
 WC> CMOS and booted with my LINUX rescue disk and lo and behold
 WC> Knoppix came right up with no problem whatsoever!

KNOPPIX is read/only. Hard to trash that. :-)

 WC> Mounted /dev/hda1 /mnt and had a look around and
 WC> the files and directories on the 98 FAT 32 partition
 WC> looked fine.

 WC> After doing a shutdown -r now from console the system
 WC> came up on the Windows emergency rescue diskette
 WC> saying I should do a "scanreg."
 WC> I did and it cycled through until there wasn't a single
 WC> valid registry backup :-(
 WC> So I ran scandisk it that pretty much vaporized anything
 WC> that looked much like Windows 98.
 WC> Yeah I had the undo disks but that too failed.
 WC> Several THOUSAND files were corrupted
 WC> and I didn't even have a Windows directory.

Still sounds like over heating to me.

 WC> Took me days to get something near what I had before
 WC> doing a clean install from scratch :-(

 WC> No file attachments opened and both AVP and F-prot
 WC> were very recently updated, virus shield in place and
 WC> ZoneAlarm operating.
 WC> Took me a second or two to reinstall LiLo
 WC> so now I've again that option on boot instead of resorting
 WC> to the diskette.

Sorry to hear about your problems.  I totally trashed W2K no less
than 12 times before getting it stable here.  I know your pain.

 RJT> In the meantime I *do* have a couple of "IBM" keyboards
here,  and hope
 RJT> they last...

 WC> Typing on one this very moment.
 WC> One of the old heavy suckers too but the O and L keys
 WC> are worn blank.

Always nice to have a familiar keyboard to type with. :-)

>
>    ,                  ,
>  o/  Charles.Angelich \o       ,
>   __o/
> / >      USA, MI      < \   __\__
 
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.46