win98 loads up but I have no icons

[alpha_wolf_11]

My computer froze up after a defrag. The when I tried to reboot, it went through the normal process until my wallpaper was visible. At this point, usually, my icons appear and off I go. Now, a small title bar with "Explorer" blinks for a fraction of a second and then nothing else happens. I have tried commercial rescue disks that lead me to an A:/ prompt and stop. I have tried to reinstall win98 over top of my existing OS(win98) and it remains the same. I can get into an edit files mode on my hard drive using Norton rescue but once there I don't have any idea what to do to any files.

Thanks for any help, Brian

[whipaway]

Fdisk, then format your HD, then you should be able to put a fresh install of Win 98 onto the HD

[alpha_wolf_11]

Thank you, I tried Fdisk and formating, now I get error messages when I try to load my drivers. I have win98 loaded but can't do anything with any hardware. I can't even get on the internet. I have DSL through a USB, but my USB driver won't install.
Thanks again for the tip, at least I have a start on rebuilding my system.

[caperjack]

Get winXP

[whipaway]

YUP, I was gonna same the same thing: Get WinXP.
BTW, what kind of error messages are you getting?

[cscgal]

Now that you have a clean system, what sorta things are going wrong? Perhaps this is a hardware problem?

[caperjack]

don't take this the wrong way we all learn the hardway,sounds like what use to happen to me when i first formated and reloaded win98 a few years back when i didn't know what i was doing and should have had someone do it for me !