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One more thing to add for future reference and help to others. Several attempts were made to reformat that drive, including fdisk, more than once. I did not do it so forgive me for not knowing proper terminology. But one thing would say the drive was empty, another thing would say it was full and so would not take any commands etc. Hubby did a reformat on the master boot record. Finally it is fixed and is happily accepting all programs, including a silly game we never could get to work before

A few final comments… As hubby was attempting to dissect and copy files, he discovered a folder on the *D*! drive called “restore” which of course contained huge files. Dangit, I almost fried the entire hard drive! He was thankfully able to copy all of the files from the Ddrive except for one folder that showed as corrupt. Thankfully (again) most of that folder was backed up on CD. It still remains to be seen if the drive is usable, although now I’m very leery of it. I think I may have totally destroyed it!

So the lessons to be learned and I post this for your future reference in helping others. BE VERY SURE of what you’re doing if you’re trying to set a restore point on Win98, or use DOS without fully understanding what you’re doing!

Yes, that is the command I used. I thought I did nothing other than look at whatever option was there and backed out of it. Sounds like I did not. I found out about the Win98 “restore” through the Cnet forums and some of the links you found.

Things are going from bad to worse, however, and I’ll spare you most of the frustrating details. The Cdrive has been reformatted but now is expressing some difficulty in accepting commands. So we think that either the drive crashed or my actions made it crash. Problem now is trying to copy the data off the Ddrive but that is my problem.

As always, THANKS for all your help !!

We have this hard drive hooked up as a secondary drive so are able to see and delete files from DOS. We are seeing duplicates of many files. There is a folder in the Program Files directory called Windows 2. We are in the process of deleting same. They are HUGE files and the poor puter is taking its time deleting same. As I asked before, *IF* a restore point had started running, would this account for all those files. Or what else could create such activity.

No, Joe, we have not been able to see what files are there. The computer still sees the drive, but if we try to do anything it freezes. Thats why we thinking about putting it in another computer as a secondary drive. We were not sure it would work. We will try and let you know. If we figure out the problem, the solution might to useful to other folks.

Legare, thank you for those comments. We had seriously considered that and it is a definite possibility. I sort of thought, however, that a hacker would not want to be so obvious as to use up 100% space! Too suspicious IMHO Or maybe it was a stupid hacker and who made a mistake

I wanted to add that this drive now will not boot up. We tried booting from safe mode, a start disk, and from DOS. It will boot from any of those, but when we try to do ANYthing at all, it freezes.

Thanks, Hans. That worked like a charm! I had tried doing that earlier but somehow had just overlooked it.

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried different variations but Word insists on trying to keep the worksheet together in a block (it is 2-1/2 pages long). Whatever doesn’t fit on the page just disappears off the bottom of the page. Oh well. Thankfully this is not something I do very often, so I can do as my first idea. Which is to revise the worksheet and then insert it into Word as a table.

Thanks folks for all your suggestions. I will check them out when I am forced back to work next week.

YAY me, got it figured out Now I see

Sorry to say I didn’ t try that, Klaus. I will experiment (I still have my original scans somewhere!), but precisely what does Ctrl+Q do? I’m not familiar with that command. When I tried looking it up, I found references to reset paragraphs, but reset to what?

Thanks jscher. That was very helpful! FYI– rtf doesn

*chuckle* Anybody thats cleaned up formatting after using OCR knows exactly what “a lot of work” means! Thanks for your help. Thats how I had been doing it. I was hoping there was a magic one-click trick, such as converting table to text. I scanned an 8 page document just before leaving work on Friday and it put 6 of the pages in text boxes. *sigh* Monday is not looking good!

I tried experiments with copies of the file. When I opened it from Word the only message I received was one asking if I wanted to open the entire workbook. On saving I did receive the ‘file will be saved as Word format’ but the default button to continue is yes. We’re using Office XP (some have SP1, only 1 has SP 2) and our server is Win2000. Could those messages be generated only in newer versions than ours? Or are we missing some security settings somewhere? As always, THANKS for your help.

I tried experiments with copies of the file. When I opened it from Word the only message I received was one asking if I wanted to open the entire workbook. On saving I did receive the ‘file will be saved as Word format’ but the default button to continue is yes. We’re using Office XP (some have SP1, only 1 has SP 2) and our server is Win2000. Could those messages be generated only in newer versions than ours? Or are we missing some security settings somewhere? As always, THANKS for your help.