Hi, it sounds to me that there is a possibility that you may have some bad
sectors on your hard drive (C:).
I'm not sure how you would go about formatting with a restore disk,I have
never tried,  but, personally, I would download an ME bootdisk from
www.bootdisk.com  and run the format using that. If there are any bad
sectors, the system will note where they are and won't attempt to write to
those parts of the C: drive.
Thinking about it, if your restore disk contains a cd and a floppy disk
like the one I possess for one of my systems, the floppy disk could have
developed a fault. The floppy which comes with my restore disk for win98 can
only be used 4 times, after which I have to make a new one. I'm not sure why
this is, but this could be your problem also.
Hopefully, this might help.
Michele Sayer

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