HELP! Big Windows Problems

[Lmandrake]

Here is my system: Soyo 6BA+IV, 128 ram, 700e @ 960, Voodoo 3 3K, Linksys NIC, Diamond HW modem, Turtle Beach Vortex 1 sound, 48x CD, SAF 6x burner, Maxtor 30 gb HD, Maxtor 15 GB HD. WIN 98 and IE 5.5

Here is my problem: Internet Exploder was acting up so I ran scandisk before repairing IE, found some corrupt files, did scandisk repair to extent possible, repaired IE. This seemed to address IE problems but my sound went away so I nuked the drivers and reinstalled them. Sound worked but IE and Explorer would crash randomly so I tried a variety of reference drivers to no avail. I went back to the Turtle Beach drivers and installed them after clearing the registry and my HD of all reference or files relating to the reference drivers. Boot after the install. Explorer crashes immediately, making windows inoperable. Boot in safe mode. same thing. Do interactive boot, saying no to most or all choices. Same thing. Booted to DOS. Went to windows system directory and deleted all .vxd and .dll files associated with sound card. Tried to reboot to safe mode, same error. Explorer crashes immediately. Have not yet nuked the .inf files for the sound card.

If i can remove the sound card by getting into safe mode, I can go back to square one and try to find the root of this problem after removing the sound card. Since I can't do that, the only thing I can think of is to physically remove the sound card and see if that helps.

My second drive is empty, so I can, if I need to, save stuff off my C: partition, and do a reinstall. That might be the best thing, but I don't have time for that right now.

I can do a repair install of windows, but found in the past that I ended with a system without windows updates and an entry somewhere in the registry or elsewhere that told windows update I was up to date when I was not. So unless there is someway to get back to zero with the update feature, I am not satisfied with that.

My questions: There is a means to use dos to copy the contents of one drive to another, I just don't remember how.
Anybody got a link or remember?

Is there a way to delete a key or a file that keeps track of your windows updates so I can do a partial re-install and then update?


If anybody has any suggestions, I would be very thankful for your input.

[wvjohn]

you may have to go directory by directory in dos but the command as i recollec tis

copy c:\[directory]\*.* [destination, d: or whatever]
copy c:\windows *.* d:\windows [example]
if you've got a copy of ghost you can copy the entire hd in one swoop and then delete the non data files from the backup drive

don't know about the update files - it's a pain i now have unstable win me and win2k partitions on my puter and not enough time to rebuild from scratch

[FlyingPenguin]

Xcopy is dicey. Ghost is better.

I would first try physically pulling the sound card and see if that solves the problem. If so, move the card to another slot and see if it behaves. Try all the available slots.

Make sure the sound card is not sharing an IRQ with anything else.

You may have a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem (this is NOT the same as an IRQ conflict).

This problem is very common with NICs, some PCI sound cards (the SBLive in particular) and SCSI controller cards. These cards do NOT like to share a PCI IRQ channel I explain the problem in detail here with a fix: http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin/glfaq5.htm#5_9