Freecell problem.

[Hippie_Tech]

I wouldn't normally even worry about something like this, but it's happened twice in two weeks and I can't figure out what's going on.
What is happening is when you open Freecell you get the title on the page that should say Freecell, but instead I get two vertical bold dashes and all I get is an hourglass. Can't play the game at all. Simple fix, right? Uninstall the games and reinstall them from the Win98 CD. Wrong. How about copying the required files from a known working machine to the problem machine? Nope. That doesn't work either.
The first machine I had to reinstall the OS to get it to work correctly. I guess I'll have to do that with the second machine as well. I just hoped someone in the forum might have run into this before and got the answer. I tried looking on Microsoft's website, but the search yielded no results. I even did a web search and couldn't find anything useful. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[MacGyver]

My first thought is to check cards.dll which could be corrupt.

My wife had some other problems with FreeCell (cards not going to the stacks in order) and we were unable to find anything on that issue. So I downloaded <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~fomalhaut/fcpro.html" target="_blank">Freecell Pro</a> which is an enhanced freeware version of Freecell. My wife loves it, plays it all the time, and hasn't told me of any problems with it.

You can find other Freecell alternatives at <a href="http://www.freecell.org" target="_blank">www.freecell.org</a>

[Hippie_Tech]

Update to my problem with the machine from hell.
I can't reinstall the Win98 OS because there is an error on the hard drive. It's telling me it can't read from the last sector on the hard drive and to check whether the drive has LBA enabled in the BIOS. It does. If I let it continue to fix the problem it gets halfway through the surface scan and starts finding BAD clusters.
Normally this wouldn't surprise me, but the drive isn't doing the normal "click for a few seconds while it fixes the problem" thing. It just goes on to the next cluster after "fixing" the problem and then moves on to the next cluster which is also bad. When I tried the autofix option it had already gotten to 1000 BAD clusters in less than a minute. One after the other.
I exited immediately when I saw what was happening. I am thoroughly confused. When I run a thorough scan in Windows, I get no errors found.
HELP ME, please, before I kill again. I can't install the OS without running scandisk first.
And before anyone asks, yes it does have an anti-virus program (InoculateIT PE) with all the newest virus signature files.
Please don't feel that it's required to comment on which anti-virus is better than another. It all comes down to personal preference as far as that is concerned.
Again thanks in advance.

[imaeditedbysowulo]

You can bypass scandisk. Instead of typing setup.exe, type in setup.exe /is and it will skip scandisk.

There are other switches that will save you time installing windows, just type setup.exe /? to get the whole list.

[DocPC]

Try scandisk from DOS with a boot disk or from "command prompt only". May be time for a new Hard Drive.

[NooNoo]

Have you downloaded the diagnostics for your hard drive? Failing that there is a nice little proggie called spinrite.exe - takes forever but you can be sure your harddrive is perfect when it finishes successfully.

[Hippie_Tech]

Another update.
Yes I have tried booting from a boot disk to run scandisk. Didn't work. And, yes, I did use Data Lifeguard as it is a Western Digital hard drive. Data Lifeguard found nothing wrong with the drive even on the long test. I also tried Ontrack. Again no problems found, but as sson as I try scandisk, bad clusters are found. I'm going to try to backup all the data and then write zeros to the drive to see what happens.
I have never seen this before and normally I would agree that it could be a bad hard drive, but the quickness with which it finds and moves on to the next bad cluster is just too weird. Never mind that the other drive utilities don't find anything wrong even with a thorough scan. It's just aggravating. I don't like not having an explanation for the customer. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[Ya_know]

[quote]Originally posted by Hippie_Tech:
<strong> I don't like not having an explanation for the customer. </strong><hr></blockquote>

If I had a dollar for every time I felt that way...

Usually, at some point, either now or when you have finished the job, you will come up with a fairly decent explanation. I think you are on the right track. If you can LLF the drive, and get no errors, you shouldn't see bad sectors anymore once you install DOS or Windows. These bad sectors may have been created if the PC was shutdown incorrectly, but there will be nothing wrong with the drive once you clean it up.

Again, I think you are on the right track, and should have no problem with an explanation like that to the customer.

[Hippie_Tech]

Final Update.
Finished the low-level format, reinstalled the OS, reinstalled software, and copied customers data back on to the hard drive. No bad clusters.
Scandisk in DOS-mode worked without a hitch. I'm still a little confused about the massive amounts of bad clusters that were reported and the speed with which scandisk "fixed" them, but....
Thanks for the support everyone.

[Kenteth420]

If its a Gateway system you need the partition table patch on this page - <a href="http://www.gateway.com/support/drivers/output.asp?curPlatform=Not+Computer+Type+Specific& curSystem=Not+System+Specific&curCommodity=undefin ed&curOS=150&curManufacturer=undefined&cu" target="_blank">http://www.gateway.com/support/drivers/output.asp?curPlatform=Not+Computer+Type+Specific& curSystem=Not+System+Specific&curCommodity=undefin ed&curOS=150&curManufacturer=undefined&cu</a> rBios=undefined&txtPartNumb=undefined

It's a known issue with windows 98 and Me and MS has a patch also but I've never seen it fix the problem before where the Gateway patch has always worked, I've never tried it on a non Gateway before though.