Since you can apparently run the drive in DOS, the safest method would probably be to take the hard drive (or the whole computer) to a computer repair person (or capable faithful friend) and have them slave the drive on a working machine and make a CD or two of the data before you try to do a lot with reinstalling the OS.

Attempting to backup your files to floppies using DOS may not be completely successful because of the filename length problem mentioned above. On a compressed drive, DOS will simply ignore files for which the total path+filename length exceeds the 66 character limit, so you may not see them all when looking for files to copy.

To see whether this is a problem, you can run ScanDisk (excuse my error when I said ChkDisk above - see the linked article) with the "automatically correct errors" box UNCHECKED. ScanDisk should stop and tell you if an excessively long pathname is found. Make a note of it and click ignore to look for the next one. You should be able to copy a folder a little higher up in your data structure to shorten the path so that everything becomes visible.

If you have the open connectors for it, you could hook up another hard drive as a slave in your machine and do a DOS copy of your files to the new drive, but the same namelength limit applies, so you might not get everything you want using DOS if you don't check the names first.

If you can slave the drive to a machine running a working Windows OS, the namelength isn't a problem, and it should be simple to get everything backed up to a CD or two. The normal limit for partition size in Win98 is 2GB, and a data CD will hold about 700MB, so you shouldn't need more than 3 CDs (per partition) if you copy everything.

While it's not normally a problem for data files, you should be aware that "legal names" for CD files are slightly different than what's legal for Windows/DOS, so a few files may get slightly different names on the CDs. If you've saved any "web pages" that have separate folders for included files, they probably won't work after being burned to CDs unless you open them in a browser and "Save As" with a SHORT, legal, Joliet filename (No "," or "-" mainly) and then burn the shortname version. If you have (unlikely?) things like Word or Project documents that link to external files you may find broken links in the CD versions if a filename gets changed.

Don't forget to save email and address books, and be sure to tell the service person (preferably in written instructions) about any "unusual" programs you have that make files with strange extensions if you want them backed up.

There should be little risk to existing data in reinstalling Win98, but no guarantees can be made and backup is recommended. This recommendation is often ignored. Assuming that you have a Win98 installation CD, you should look for the Setup.txt file in the Windows98 folder on your own CD. The setup.txt file linked above gives help on getting your CD drive up in DOS if that's a problem. (Look for "INSTALLING WINDOWS 98 FROM MS-DOS").

You may need to clear some space on your drive for the reinstall. Exactly how much is a little ambiguous. You could need up to 355 MB free, but since the reinstall will replace many existing files you can probably get by with a lot less for a reinstall. If you can get setup.exe launched, it will tell you pretty quickly - before any damage is done - if you don't have enough space.

John