Are there any error messages? Has anything been changed on your pc - s/w installed or removed? Is anything else giving problems?

Ian G.

Thanks for the help.It appears there was an insoluable registry problem which caused the mess, possibly complicated by bad sectors on the physical drive. My video drive is intact, but I am yet to see whether my project was not corrupted in any way. If it was I may need help restoring it if this is possible. But I cannot do anything until my drive is replaced.

Thank you again.

Kriben

Is your hd a gonner? Try this 1st:

Go to Start > Shutdown, and choose 'Restart the computer in MS-DOS'

At the blinking cursor, type the following commands successively, hitting 'enter' after EACH line:

cd\
cd windows\command
scanreg /fix

The Scanreg tool will now proceed to rebuild your registry, which can take some time.

When it finished, type exit or win, followed by hitting 'enter' to return to Windows.
Ctrl-alt-delete will work as well.

You will have refreshed, compacted and repaired your Registry, and this sometimes fixes this type of registry error.

However, the other problems will probably each need to be addressed separately anyway..

If it keeps on happening, it may be defective RAM modules that are causing this.
In that case, try checking them with DocMemory or a similar app.
(Thanks to TonyKlein)
Plus there are other solutions. Good luck.

Your advice may have worked, but I did a scan disk first, which simply caused more problems. When I tried scanreg, the windows directory had already been renamed. Later it was found thaht the hard drive was faulty, although initially I could access some of my directories through dos. In the rush to get a new hard drive I didn't check my backups, and one of them cannot opened (zipped file - have any ideas, which contains important files. These were still on the drive when the technician formatted it. I now have a new drive, and am wondering whether Windows XP is better for VF than win 98?

Thanks

I had scandisk (thoro) probs on my 'c' drive. The hd wasn't recognised by dos and I eventually had to format it. Sometimes it seems a hd is gone, when formatting is all that's needed. Here's a useful utility which checks hd's for integrity: ftp://ftp.gw2k.co.uk/bootdisc/desktop download the file win9598 to desktop, run prog to create bootdisk, quit to dos amd type 'cd gwscan', should bring you to C:/GWSCAN, run gwscan exe. and choose test scan option. It will tell you if hd is on it's last legs or can be repaired.

Is your zipped file on the hd that's been formatted. If it's important there's a data retrieval utility at $69: http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Which os? Difficult. I still use 98se, but M$ support for that is finishing soon. XP seems to be the way to go, but there are still irritations with it - some dv camcord driver support is conflicting. But xp'ers may disagree.