Thanks a million Dean kukral for your exhaustive and very encouraging reply.
Thanks also for [log in to unmask] for providing a link to ms dos command  which i had asked for and also to David Gillet, Joseph Marty and Lynn Tracy for their posts.

I followed Dean's advise and since the dell HD was connected as a single device with a cable with only two connectors (one for the mobo and the other for the HD) i assumed it will be jumpered to master and so did not change anything but changed the non working pc HD jumper to slave and booted.

It all went very well including the bios and dragging and dropping directories, files etc. to free space in my non working pc HD.I was elated at the ease of operations suggested by Dean kukral and my ability to follow them.

But alas when i went back to my main objective of reloading win 98 se on my non working pc HD it simply won't load with various error messages mainly of correcting cross linked files. i suddenly realised that i had moved and emptied my "program files" directory(after renaming it to program files-1) to free space. probably i should not have done this because i remember having read sometime ago in this forum that the os and program files directory should reside in the same logical drive.

So i again went back to dragging and dropping the program files-1 directory from dell HD to non working pc HD and tried to reinstall win 98se but till now am simply unable to do it. possibly the existing windows directory has become too mangled up with so much fiddling around.i am sure there is enough space because during "set up" windows checks for free space and did not report anything and just ticked it ok.

so i tried to copy and empty windows directory(shift+ cick and drag and drop in dell HD) but windows will not allow and said "access denied"

so the position as of now is (especially to lynn who wants to help but would like to know what is it that i am trying):-

(A)installed a new mobo and cpu, connected up(1)my old HD with win 98 se (2)my old lg cd rom,(3)old sony dvd player (4) old samsung cdrw  and booted up about 20 days ago. bios showed primary master ide=my old HD, slave ide=lg cd rom,
secondary master ide=dvd player slave ide=cdrw.

(B) however when i went to device manager i found that only my hd was recognised as disk drive (along with floppy drive of course which also i had connected separately in the floppy channel on the mobo)and my cdrom under cdrom drive heading. in other words windows did not recognise my dvd player and cdrw.

(C)At that stage i fiddled around by changing jumpers etc in the various drives, and possibly also with some windows system files(frankly can not remember what i did with system files but sure nothing that would corrupt it.

(D)Suddenly one day windows froze with only the logo on screen and would not load.

(E) That is when i sent my first post to the forum.

(F)I am still in the same position and as stressed by Dean wish to avoid reformat since i do not have much of my data backed up(very foolish of me)

very sorry for the annoyingly long post but any help will be greatly appreciated. God bless and allof you have a nice day.-- venkat viswanathan

 PS:-regarding David Gillet and Joseph Marty's posts both have a point regarding dell system because i have an old HP ide cable with connectors marked for mobo, primary ide, slave ide and i connected it reversly to my dell HD  JUMPERED TO MASTER but bios showed "none"in master?

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