Packard Bell win98 os problem with new HDD

[SANDFOX007]

My wife's Packard Bell PII 500 hard drive was infected with boot virus and the recovery disk/s were of no help. Drive is a Maxtor 15GB. scandisk failures FAT table allocation table faults corrupted CAB files MBR was rewritten and still could not recover Win98SE. Data was transfered to My Win98 PC so was able to save it. Maxtors PowerMax.exe drive tool was run thru all the tests and drive checks out OK Tried a Reinstall with the Packard Bell recovery disk set. Scandisk failures etc. Run LLF using Powermax tried again diddnt work. Reinstalled the Maxtor into my old PC run Powermax LLF partitioned and formated installed Win98 up and running fine. Now the Packard Bell still sais that there are errors and missing files and won't run Win98. What do I need to do to make this work? Please and Thankyou.

 

[wolluf]

Can you clarify - you installed 98 on the disk in your old PC then installed disk in your wife's machine (with 98 installed on you old machine?). If this is so, your problems are likely the normal driver (mainly motherboard) issues when you do this - ie, it often doesn't work, 98 need installing on the disk in the machine its going to run on.

If I've got this wrong, can you still clarify exactly what you've done?

If you ran LLF on your wife's machine & it wouldn't install 98 after that, it suggests a hardware issue with your wife's machine (i take it you have got rid of boot virus - including any floppies that were used in machine while infected, with write protection off).

 

[SANDFOX007]

I installed the Maxtor as the master HDD in my PII 350 machine which has been running Win98+ had Win98 load generic drivers and went thru clean Win98 installatin.
I also tried to get the Packard Bell Win98SE 3disk set to run on the wifes machine but can never get Win to load comes up with Scandisk errors which if you tell it to fix them gets you to the Setup point for Win which then says that there is a corrupted or damaged .CAB file (on the CD)and punts you back to an >A:
I have done this with dissimalar machines befour where you have to rerun setup and load a different set of drivers for the display and system but never this problem. Also this is the first Packard Bell machine I have had to work with. Hope that helps.

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried installing 98 (rather than using the restore disks) on your wife's machine?

The problem with installing 98 on your machine & then trying to boot your wife's machine with it is as i said the drivers (not the display drivers - most likely those associated with the motherboard's chipset). Some people recommend booting machine in safe mode with drive in original (where installed) machine & removing as much as you can in device manager. Then try again in target machine.

But the symptoms you get when trying the PB restore sound like hardware (eg, RAM) issue. Does this process involve just CD(s) or floppies & CDs? If floppies - did you note my comment about boot virus (ie, if there are PB floppies, they may be infected. Boot sector virus can also produce symptoms like hardware probelms - because they corrupt values in memory).

 

[SANDFOX007]

Yes I have tried installing 98 on the wife's machine and recieved .CAB file corrupt and Scandisk Errors or FAT table invalid messages. I had also made new boot/recovery disk in case something was infected on the first one.
PB process involves floppie & 3CDs.
Ram I have swapped between the machines and it all works fine. sdram pc 100. Will try the safe mode and see if that gets me any further.

 

[Igor106]

This may sound a bit dumb, but seeing you had some problems installing from the CD's (the bad .CAB file), may it be due to CD ROM unability to read the CDs? Try swiching the CD ROM from your computer to your wife's and see if the WIN 98 installation will go fine.
I had similar problems with the Win 95 installation, and realized that it was because the CD was too scratched.
Hope this helps

 

[pmasley]

Here is an easier way, since you want to use WIN98. Put it into your working system (assuming it is also a 98 machine) as a slave. Start your machine. Format the disk (assuming no other partitions), and copy the system files to the root directory of the hardrive. Then load the 98 CD and then copy the contents of the WIN98 directory to a folder (such as setup) on the slave. Also, if you know what drivers are needed for the video, sound, motherboard, nic and modem, copy them into respective named folders also under the setup directory.

Reinstall the HD to the other machine, boot it, go to setup and install 98. If it ask for drivers, you should have them already on the drive......saves about an hour setup doing it this way. Also, If it occurs again, all you have to do is flush the windows directory and reinstall.