Gurney -

It depends a bit on which maker is involved, but the diagnostic/setup programs supplied by the manufacturers generally do a good job with drive diagnostics. It is possible, even on a brand new hard drive to have a few ratty clusters. Normal low level format at the factory just marks the bad ones and excludes them from use by the drive. Many new drives will have a table on the nameplate showing which clusters were blocked out.

SOME of the diagnostic utilities can "scrub" a drive to identify any new scabby ones that have crept in, mark them, and give you back the ones that are good. They also can do a pretty good job of identifying things like head-tracking deviations and spin rate wobble that may indicate that a drive may be "tending toward failure."

If you're missing a couple of files and know what they are you should be able to extract just the ones you need from CAB files on your installation disk(s), without the need to do a reformat and reinstall of the whole system.

It has been some years since I've used it, but with Win98 it often was possible to just do an "overlay" installation. Files that are present will be overwritten, and missing ones will be added. It was never an officially recommended practice, but lots of people did it.

One problem with internet connection that was somewhat "peculiar" to Win95 - Win98 relates to the built-in Internet Connection Sharing. Once it's turned on, it can't be easily removed, so if you've migrated a Windows installation from another machine that might have used it, your Internet Explorer may be "corrupted" - perhaps on your installation disk unless they're original issue. Removing IE by normal methods won't fix it, since ordinary removal merely reverts back to a default - and probably corrupt - IE core version.

There is - or was - a published procedure for turning it (ICS) off, but it requires manually deleting a couple of dozen files, which essentially disables Win98 until you reinstall a clean IE. If there's a possibility that you're getting your source files from a machine that may have had ICS running at any time, it could cause major internet connection problems, especially if you have a network connection (LAN) to any other computer active. It'll be hard enough to find that I won't even try to look for it unless you think it might be applicable.

John