I have just been given a very nice compaq presario laptop for nothing, only thing is it has major virus infection. Someone decided to delete all the infected files and now the computer will not boot at all - it thinks it has a floppy disc in the drive, when in fact it does not.
I have no recovery disc for this machine so i was wondering whether i could re install direct from a win98 disc or do something via dos? Is it possible, using a set of commands, to scrap the whole o/s and start again?
Yes. As long as you have the Win98 cd you can easily wipe your hard drive clean (reformat) via dos and then proceed to reinstall the OS. In fact before that you can even partition your drive into different logical drives to make everything more organized. Before you do so however make a Win98 boot disk. You don't have to specifically make it on the laptop, and Win98 boot disk from any computer should work.
You can find plenty of resources on reformatting and reinstalling OS on the internet. Just search Yahoo! for "reformatting" "or reinstalling windows 98".
Depending on how old the notebook is, you could if you wished, call Compaq and they might be able to send you a recovery cd for that model. They most likely would you charge you for shipping.
I stuck a win98 disc in but it does not even run it when i switch the laptop back on. problem is a lot of system files were totally deleted. how do i re install using command prompts? i tried typing a path to the disc but it couldn't understand it and i can't even get into the bios, safe mode etc
not sure if a recovery disc would be any good as i don't think there is anything 100% recoverable. I leaning towards a new hard drive?
You have to use a boot disk. The boot disk will allow you to format your hard drive and access FDISK to create new partitions. Then you can reinstall Windows 98. Like I said search yahoo.com for some better more in depth instructions on how to format your hard drive and reinstall Windows 98. It's really easy and there's a lot of information on how to do it.