I’m amazing; there’s no denying it. Being a complete DOS idiot (and, as a Unix non-idiot, rather proud of it), I still managed to fix Gina’s laptop and am now in the process of backing up her files to my server (which, at 56K, is taking forever). Turns out the problem with her machine had to do with the VFAT device (which stores long file names). The solution was to boot from a floppy and extract a new copy of the ifshlp.sys file from the Win98 CD-ROM via the extract command, which looks like this:
extract /a e:\win98\win98_21.cab ifshlp.sys /l c:\windows
That bit of ugliness means “dig around on the Windows 98 CD-ROM and find the cab file that contains ifshlp.sys. Then install it onto the hard drive in the ‘windows’ directory.” Isn’t DOS hideous? Unix doesn’t have cab files. But if it did, the line to extract them would be a bit more elegant, I should hope.
Anyway, Gina’s laptop is (for the moment) fixed. In fact, I’m posting this from it. And I’m going to back up every relevant thing before the drive decides to go down again. I’ve lost whatever mystical faith I had in the stability of hard drives. I’ve become a firm believer in the necessity of skeduled (daily, if possible) backups. That’s going to be one of my new priorities at work–to back up mission critical files daily and to back up everything on a regular schedule.