my apologies in advance if i'm posting in wrong forum, just let me know, and i'll repost/delete (been a year or two since i used this website, and y'all were helpful then, so i'm grateful). also, i'll try to be brief with the background info....
back in the day (oh, maybe a dozen or so years ago), bought the 1st family PC. Dell Dimension 4100 running Windows ME. Took care of it best i could (ad-aware, zonealarm, norton anti-virus, etc). Served the family good for probably 5 or 6 years, before time started taking it's toll, and registry slowly became gummed up w/crap. my preventive maintenance/repair skills were limited to basic, do-it-yourself type stuff; i was scared of messing w/registry, ini files, or reloading windows, etc., because i didn't want to 'blow it up' so to speak, and cause irreparable damage.
well, eventually got to point where it wouldn't start, and so enter next door neighbor, Eddie....
Eddie was a PC geek (also a meth head i later learned, but i digress...), but was a good soul, and offered to help. I was grateful. he fixed the startup problems, then i was able to get all important info/pics out of PC and put on disk. At that point, at his suggestion, he wiped entire PC clean, and reloaded Windows. Of course, help from a computer nerd meant that I needed to partition my drive (which it wasn't before), get rid of windows ME for a copy of Windows 98 (on one side of partition if memory serves me correctly), Windows XP Professional, i think (on other side of partition for the wife to logon), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird (because no self proclaimed hacker geek would be caught dead using IE or Outlook, I suppose), and other changes.
I was grateful, because everything worked fine (and faster), and eventually learned to love some of the improvements (the Mozilla stuff fer sure). Family PC worked fine for the next 3 or 4 years. During which time Eddie went to prison for drugs. So no more next door neighbor resource.
Ultimately, at the end of that time (around 2005 or 2006), one side of the partition started running out of space, and PC really started bogging down. Until the one day it wouldn't boot properly at all. Being that it was just getting old, and figuring the money i would spend on fixing it could probably be better used replacing it, i did just that, and put it in a box, knowing that i would ultimately need to fix it, in order to get the baby pics out of it.
Enter the wife....
well, 5 years later, wife is pissed. she wants the baby and toddler pics NOW. no more waiting. So i fire up this pc that's been in a box for half a dozen years, and finally get it to come to life, and get it to partially boot, but it won't load windows. it says config/sys32/etc. is missing or corrupt. please input setup disk, and hit "r" option. well, here's the punchline:
I DON'T HAVE THE *censored* STARTUP DISKS, BECAUSE EDDIE NEVER GAVE ME A COPY OF THEM, AND I DIDN'T THINK TO ASK HIM AT THE TIME.
best i can tell, is i have Windows 98. i've tried getting it to go into safe mode, but was only able to get there once. i've tried my original Dell WindowsME disks, but no luck. Obviously, i can't just start over, because i need the info off of the hard drive, and although i can see the directories in DOS, i couldn't tell you for the life of me which pics were in which folders, etc. *censored*, i'm not even sure which side of the partition they're on, so i don't even think reloading windows on one side of the partition or the other would work for me.
with all of that being said, i don't think the PC is in that bad of shape. i've got a disk that i got from Eddie back in the day called "techie tools", in which I've been able to see some information about my machine, and basically, i think everything is there and functional, apart from windows starting up.
Can somebody offer me some advice?
Thanks for any/all help.
And I promise all future posts won't be nowhere near this long....
