Reinstall Windows, I guess. I think your shareware disks might be infected with some type of a virus. It happened back in the day. :<

Ask old hardware and driver/configuration questions in Marvin. This forum is for old Windows games on modern systems.

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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Reinstall Windows, I guess. I think your shareware disks might be infected with some type of a virus. It happened back in the day. :<

Crap. I really hope it doesn't come down to this. It took me forever and a day to get 98 running exactly the way I wanted it to, and there are at least 100 games installed. A reinstall would suck on so many levels.

If it is a virus (and it kind of looks that way, with the strange characters), I wonder why it only seems to affect Windows. I ran these shareware disks on a 286-16 with DOS 6 long before even Win95 was released. That system was fine.

Also wondering what caused that initial shutdown. I didn't think it was possible for software to turn off the PSU outside of Windows.

Tried running SCANDISK in DOS? Probably the FAT was damaged.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Crap. I really hope it doesn't come down to this. It took me forever and a day to get 98 running exactly the way I wanted it to, […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Reinstall Windows, I guess. I think your shareware disks might be infected with some type of a virus. It happened back in the day. :<

Crap. I really hope it doesn't come down to this. It took me forever and a day to get 98 running exactly the way I wanted it to, and there are at least 100 games installed. A reinstall would suck on so many levels.

If it is a virus (and it kind of looks that way, with the strange characters), I wonder why it only seems to affect Windows. I ran these shareware disks on a 286-16 with DOS 6 long before even Win95 was released. That system was fine.

Also wondering what caused that initial shutdown. I didn't think it was possible for software to turn off the PSU outside of Windows.

Maybe your 286 never met the conditions to activate the virus payload, or something in the way the software was written just doesn't play nicely with Win9x. What particular programs were you trying to run?

Bio Menace, Gateworld, and Skyglobe. The shareware versions all use the ATANAK installer. They installed and ran just fine from within Windows. No signs of damage until I tried to boot the PC last night.

Thinking I might install Win98 on a spare drive and copy over the boot files.

derSammler wrote:

Tried running SCANDISK in DOS? Probably the FAT was damaged.

Scandisk found nothing wrong.

To check for malware, I'd highly recommend using F-Prot for DOS.

No virus. I'm going to have to reinstall Windows, aren't I... 😢

I would run some hardware diags (Memtest and possible a disk SMART diag) just to be sure the shareware isn't a coincidence and the problem doesn't have a hardware origin .

Also, there was a switch (win /b?) that generated a boot log, so you can check where does windows fail.

Then, you can check the files/devices involved and remove them from win.in I.

Most games wont require re installing after a fresh install of windows, just double click game.exe and It'll fire up as if nothings ever changed.

So for now if you add a second HDD, boot from a floppy/CD copy your games, over.
You can then wipe the disk, reintall windows, then simply copy everything back.

A lot of people here keep games, drivers, even the windows cab files on a second partition for exactly when this happens.
Personally I have:
C:\ Windows, Programs
D:\ Games
E:\ Rebuild (drivers, windows cabs)

if you has less than 50% of space used in your hard disk you can use bootit ng on a floppy(not the bootit bm) , resize your partition to the minimun size , create a new partition, do a fresh install, copy your files and games to the new partition, boot again with bootit ng floppy, delete the old partition, slide the new one to the beginning of the disk and resize it to the full capacity of the disk or your desired capacity.
I dont know if the official website still offer the download of the older version but even it say its trial if you only use the partition manager and not the boot manager it will be fine.

Thanks for all of the help guys. I finally reinstalled Win98 over itself as suggested and it actually boots back to my old desktop! Didn't even need to reinstall any drivers. Most of my programs still work, too. Some aren't launching; they'll obviously need a reinstall. But no matter, it's working a lot better than I thought it would. 😁