In the previous page, I told you about two Win95 tools (ERU and CFGBack) that let you make copies of your critical system files when your system is running fine. If---or rather, when---your system is hosed by an errant software installation or a similar problem, you can use ERU and CFGback to restore your system to a known-good state.

But what about Win98? And what if ERU and CFGback don’t do the trick for Win95?

You always can try reinstalling Windows right on top of your current installation. The fresh install may correct version conflicts, replace missing DLLs, and so on, and it should pick up your existing settings so you don’t have to reinstall everything. (You should have a good backup anyway, just in case.)

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. Normally, your only option at this point is a time-consuming, laborious, full-blown reformat and reinstall--- and that’s a fine thing to do from time to time. We’ll cover that in detail, and give some time-saving tips and tricks, in next week’s column. But there’s a simpler alternative: A fast, easy, no-reformat full reinstall. I first wrote about this a year ago, but from the questions I’ve been getting in the mail, it’s clear a lot of new readers haven’t heard about this trick. Here’s how you do it:

As with any system-level repair work, you should first back up your entire hard drive and verify that your Startup Disk works and has all the files you need on it, just in case. Also, gather your install diskettes for your CD, sound card, video card, and so on.

Next, copy the entire /WIN9x directory from your Win9x CD to a new directory called C:/WIN9x on your hard drive.

Now copy DELTREE.EXE from the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory to the C:\ directory.

Here comes the fun part: DELTREE is a powerful tool that lets you wipe out whole branches of your directory tree at once. Exit Windows, and from a C:\ prompt type DELTREE /Y C:\WINDOWS C:\PROGRA~1 and take a coffee break. DELTREE will wipe out every file of your old Windows setup and any applications installed in the Program Files directory; it then will delete the directories themselves. But that’s all it will do: Unlike FORMAT, DELTREE will leave untouched and intact all your data files in other directories.

When DELTREE is done (it’ll take a while), reboot. The system will restart, and then complain with an error message that it can’t find Windows and the Registry. (Of course not: You just deleted it!) When you’re at a DOS prompt, switch to the C:/WIN9x directory on your hard drive and run SETUP to install Windows

Next, install any special hardware drivers your system needs, and then reinstall your applications. When you’re done, you should have a system with a lean, fast, virgin installation of Windows and your applications--- but with all your data files intact on the hard drive, just where you left them and in your familiar directory structure.

Can things go wrong? That's always possible. But you have a fresh system backup as safety net, so you can get back to where you were.

I regularly use this fast-install method when some application or other has messed things up, or when Windows starts to show weirdnesses and instabilities. With practice, I now can totally reinstall Windows and my major applications in less than an hour--- far, far less time than a full-blown reformat and reinstall of all data and applications.

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