My mother-in-law downloaded a program from the net, then decded to delete it. In the process she deleted a file named msagent. When she rebooted she got a black screen that said "Operating System Not found".
I have tried to walk her through a scanreg /restore, but it would not read the hard drive. When she puts her 98se floppy in and types fdisk, she get a bad command or file name. A reboot with no floppy gives her a message saying that her fat file is missing and to use fdisk to re-partition. And no matter what drive we choose to run fdisk, it says bad command or file name. As far as I can tell she has lost her hard drive for good, with out some expert help. I am not sure what she does, but some where it told her that there was no fixed disk present.
How could you lose a hard drive so easily? I told her it sounds as though "MSAGENT" must have been a very important file.
Can some one help me to help her fix this.
I am in Dallas Texas helping her long distance on the phone, because her and her computer is in Virginia.
I will call her and relay any and everthing you tell me to do, she is not computer savy. So all I ask is to try and keep it simple so the information will not get lost in translation.
Thanls in advance....

P.S. I have another thread here about my laptop...still waiting for more advice on it...Dan Penny has done a great job so far...THANKS AGAIN FOR ALL OF Y'ALLS HELP!!!!!!

Hello again.

So I take it your mother-in-law has no way to access the net, and all we have to work with is her dead machine?

She has the 98 EBD? (Emergency Boot Disk)

Was it created on her machine? This is important as it appears to be our only lifeline.

Does she have a Win98 Install CD? (For installing, or upgrading, the system.) I do not mean a RESTORE CD which is issued with proprietary systems like Compaq, Hewett Packard, Gateway, Dell, etc.

If the machine will boot from the floppy, start the machine without CDROM support. (This provides more memory for the following task.)

Once the A:\> prompt is returned, type in

scandisk/all/autofix/nosummary

Once completed, remove the floppy and try to boot. If successful, the FAT tables and/or Master Boot Record have been repaired.

If it still returns the "No operating system found" error, reboot the machine with the floppy (same way) and at the A:\> prompt, type in

fdisk/mbr

and hit Enter. There will be no message, it will just return to the A:\> command prompt.

Remove the floppy and try to boot. If successful, the Master Boot Record has been repaired.

If it still returns the "No operating system found" error, reboot the machine with the floppy (same way) and at the A:\> prompt, type in

sys c:

and hit Enter. There should be a "System transferred" message once completed.

Remove the floppy and try to boot. If successful, the system files have been repaired.

That's enough to help see where we are for now. Post back with any results or further information.

DAN your the MAN...
scandisk/all/autofix/nosummary
Worked like a charm...within minutes she was back up and online.
I can not thank you enough.
You ROCK.
Now if I could only get my laptop going agian...

You may close this thread and pat yourself on the back
THANKS AGAIN !!!!!

Great. Glad to hear it.