WARNING: the following contains a lot of techno-babble so if you hate it just know I got it working again and skip to the bottom
Ok first the computer crashed BIG TIME
Then I crashed trying to get it up and working again.
I quickly realized that I can be incredibly stupid sometimes. When I was unpacking I found a box of old diskettes that I never use anymore (some go back to DOS days and I had copied them all to cds so I tossed the box.Oops. It had my WinME boot disk in it. So a quick boot was out of the question.
My version of WinME just would not boot from the CD install program. I tried to boot from DOS and went nowhere. WinME was an update version from Win(* so I tried that boot disk. Nope not that either.
So I found an old hard drive with WinME and put that in the machine as the master drive and my crashed drive in as the slave. Well I got it booted but it refused to "see" the slave drive. sigh
Got another hard drive with Win98 installed on it. (sure am glad I kept these drives) I got that drive working and it could see the crashed drive but it couldn't see either of the cd drives. But I was able to transfer my WAB file (address book for my email) my Favorites so I still have all my wanderings on the net, and all the files I had in My Documents
After several tries I was able to format the C drive and then tried to install Win98 But it refused to install WinME I tried installing from DOS, from the CD - nothing It just refused to install.
Well I figured that if I was down to Win98 there wasn't much I could do. So I started to install the Sympatico interent service and WIN 98 just would not install it. It kept asking for drivers but wouldn't let me know which driver it wanted. I made several calls to Sympatico technicians and they couldn't figure it out.
So after a week of withdrawal from JWD and everything else I do on a computer I called my son-in-law and asked if he had a OS he wasn't using anymore. Yeah!!!!!! He had one and I just received it this morning. Installed the program then Sympatico and here I am.
I still don't have any programs installed and I still need to check to see if my other hard drive (with all my other saved files on it) so I have a bit of work to do with that - OK a LOT of work but at least I am back on line. My biggest fear right now is that I lost all the files I was working on for the BEST Of series (probably everything from Oct 2004)
The good thing is that I did a lot of knitting. A shrug, a scarf for my grand-daughter's birthday last week as well as half a sweater for next Christmas; a sweater and parka for my grandson; and half a cape and a pant and jacket set for my baby granddaughter.
