Start Over

Is there anyway to start over from scratch. Can you delete the bootwiz folders, unistall and then reinstall.

George

 

Exactly what are you wanting to start over?

If it's OSS, OSS would need to be uninstalled first. Otherwise it will just recreate the BOOTWIZ folders.

 

I would like to uninstall DDS and start all over from scratch but I don't want to wipe my drives. I have operating systems (xppro/w sp3) on two separate drives. I used to have three seperate instances of xp pro/w sp3 but I tried to install Windows 98 and made a mistake. After that, I would see 3 extra drive letters in the explorer and under disk management. I could not get rid of those drives and so I tried Tweak UI. This did the trick but after this, DDS would seem to freeze during start up. Sometimes it would freeze during the analyzing part of start up on the last drive. Sometimes it would act as if all the analyzing was ok but the GUI disapeared and would not come back. I have run dskchk on all drives and they do not report any errors. I reformated the drive that DDS froze on with Windows Disk Manager but as I said, now DDS never finishes the startup. I have looked at the task manager when this is going on and it says Diskdirector.exe is using 98% of my cpu. This can not be good. I have a 2.4g Intel processor and 1.5gs of memory. I just thought it might be easier to start all over from the beginning by uninstalling DDS and starting all over from the beginning short of reformatting my drives.

Thanks

George

 

Uninstalling DD should not wipe any of your drives.

It sounds like something got corrupted with your drives. Even if you reinstall DD, it may not let it work correctly.

Installing older versions of Windows can cause quite a few problems if not done correctly. Do you know the mistake you made and exactly what happened as a result? Do you know for sure that Windows 98 will run correctly on your computer? Most newer computers lack any drivers for Windows 95/98/ME.

If you boot to the DD CD and run DD, does it see the drives okay or does it also hang on the partition scanning?

 

I'm not sure what the error I made was as I was more concerned with getting rid of all those extra drive letters (ghosts) that showed up after the attempt. No I don't know for sure that Windows 98 will run on my machine. I just wanted to try is as there is an application that was included in Windows 98 that is not included in their newer OS's. I have uninstalled DDS and reinstalled it and it did not fix the problem. When I boot from the DD CD, it also hangs on partition scanning. Does DDS delete the bootwiz files from the drives when it is uninstalled? It seems to me that I could delete the bootwiz files and restore the boot.ini file so that whatever drive I want to be active will start the OS and just reinstall DD and hopefully it would rewrite the bootwiz files from OSS and everything would be fine again. I'm just thinking outloud here and could be way off base. I consider you to be the best source for help on figuring out what to do to get it back to it's original state.

Thanks

George

 

The problem is not the BOOTWIZ folders or their contents. My guess is the problem is that something is corrupted in either the partition tables or the structure of the partitions.

If your Windows 98 program doesn't require DirectX or direct access to devices (USB devices, for example), I would consider running it in a VM (Virtual PC, etc.) instead of installing it. On newer computers, installing Windows 98 is usually a waste of time and effort.

Does the Safe Mode version of DD also hang on starting?

If Windows (on whichever drives) is working properly, do you have current image backups of the drive(s) (with True Image, for example)?

Does it make a difference when you boot to the DD cd and start DD if only one drive is connected? In other words, do you know which drive is causing the problem?

Also, when you say you have two separate drives, do you mean two physical hard drives or do you mean two partitions on one physical drive?

 

They were physical hard drives. I do not have any drive images. Safe Mode Hangs as well. I disconnected all of my drives (6) except one of the system drives. DD Safe Version Hung again. I disconnected that drive and reconnected the other system drive. Same thing. It is always looking for an extra drive because both times it was trying to analyize the D drive when it hung. There was no D drive as only one drive was connected. Each one of those drives would boot normally using the OS selector as I have mine set to give me a menu. I have (6) drives in this system. I do remember now what the error I made when trying to install Windows 98 was. I had three system drives with Windows xp pro on each. Everything was working fine. I decided to install Windows 98 in a second partition on the third drive. When I created the second partition on that drive, I partitioned it as an NTFS drive. When I tried to install Windows 98 on that partition I got an installation error. That partition should have been an fat32 partition. Then every time I would boot up, I would have three extra drive letters. (M N O). I could not get rid of them. I reformatted the drive using Windows disk management. The extra drive letters were still there. The only way I could get rid of them was to use Tweak UI.

Thanks

George