>Greeting to all UT users,
>
> I have a pentium 166, 32mb RAM, 24X cdrom drive, 1 850md hd,
>1 220mb hd and 1 540mb hd (C,D,E) .
> I've installed 98 and it worked fine, I've compressed the
>D and E drive, then I tried to install Norton Antivirus for dos
>then it hanged my pc when I restarted my machine it gave me a message that my C drive is no longer bootable, then when I tried to boot in a startup disk made in 95, the program file subdirectory and windows subdirectory is gone, I don't know if its deleted or cannot be acced in a startup made in 95.
> In my E drive I have a copy of the full installer of 98 but the problem is that I cannot access it in dos bec. its compressed.
> Is there a way in dos that is possible to access a compressed drive.
It depends on what you mean by 'DOS'. If you create a boot disk for Win98 that contains the same compression drivers (I assume that you've used Win98's DriveSpace to compress the drive) and boot from that, you should be able to see and access the compressed partitions. If this is what you need, you can do this from a Win98 Startup disk created during your original installation, or on another Win98 system now from Control Panel-Add/Remove Software-Startup Disk.
Your best bet, once you've got access to the drive, is to back up what you can - the compressed drives are actually just special files on the host partititon, and are likely to be damaged or lost during the reinstall of Win98. Once backed up, I would then notr use compressions at all; if you really feel a need to compress the hard drive, add a second drive, and do not compress the partition that Win98 boot from or has its swap file on.
I would strongly recommend against using compression under Win98; first, because of the sort of problems that you have here, and second, because it will prevent you from using FAT32 on larger drives - compression and FAT32 don't mix.
Finally, don't install DOS tools like NAV DOS on your system - they don't usnderstand things like Long File Names, and can create tremendous problems (as you've seen here). Use tools that are known compatible with at least Win95b (aka OSR2.x) or Win98 certified.
