Carole,

Here are two items for you to try.
First run the scandisk program to make sure there are no problems with the
hard drive (or the files stored on it)
Click START -- RUN and then type SCANDISK into the white box and press
ENTER to activate the program.
In the dialog box that next appears, make sure there is a blue bar for
drive C.  (If not click on C: in the list)
Next click the circle next to THOROUGH and click the box next to
AUTOMATICALLY FIX
Now click START.  Depending on the size of your hard drive, this process
will run for 15-90 minutes.
Once the process completes, shut down your PC and then restart it and see
if drive A works.

If the above does not fix the problem then:
Remove/delete the floppy driver and let windows reinstall it.
First start the WINDOWS explorer and change the setting to view hidden
files.
On the menu bar, click VIEW -- FOLDER OPTIONS and then click the VIEW tab.
In the white box, click the circle next to SHOW ALL FILES and then the OK
button at the bottom.
Now go to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32
and delete the file IOS.VXD

This may cause your PC to lock up (frozen).  If it does, just shut off the
power and after 3-5 seconds turn it back on.
If it did not lock up, then do a normal shut down and then restart it.

When you start back up, windows will ask you to insert your WIN 98CD.
Follow all the instructions you see on the screen.

If this does not solve your problem, then you will need to reinstall
windows, as the technician told you.
Just put the CD in the drive and close the drawer.  You will see
instructions on the screen to REinstall windows.

Jim Meagher
=====
Micro Solutions Consulting        Member of The HTML Writers Guild
http://www.ezy.net/~microsol     International Webmasters Association
410-543-8996                MS Site Builder Network - Level 2 member
=====
----- Original Message -----
From: carole <>
> We were told by a computer service man that our problem is probably a
> missing DLL. He told us we should do a complete harddrive cleanout and
> reload the windows program. This is all very well but we also have
> sidekick95 loaded and he doesn't know whether he can save a cardfile
that is
> in sidekick. We have changed the floppy drive, no result. He went to Dos
and
> copied a file. We cannot write to the A drive, we can copy a file from
one
> folder to another in C drive. As far as we can recall we were installing
Dr
> Solomon's antivirus program when this all started, we have since taken
the
> program off. The only new hardware is a new floppy drive about a week
ago to
> try and clear our problem to no avail. We were advised to do a refresher
> reinstall of windows, but got no reply when we asked if this was a
special
> kind of reinstall or was it just a download of the windows on top of our
> present program, we have the windows 98 CD-Rom. We do appreciate all
your
> help but as novices we sometimes are not too sure what some words mean
in
> the computer world,    Carole Long

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