XP newby reinstall problem

[Mike37]

I had XP up and running for about a week . . . worked great. My system is on all the time (not hooked up to the net) and after doing some computer work one morning, I whent to my shop for the remainder of the day. Late that afternoon, I returned to my computer. To my surprize, I had a black screen with "non system disk error" plastered on the screen. I had no disks in the floppy, Zip, or CD drive. I figured track zero on my HD had gone south. However, after ChkDsk took a look, it seemed that track zero was OK as were all my directories.

Anyway, I had to reinstall XP. Since XP found no previous windows on the system (evidently, It couldn't see itself on disk) it asked for my Win98 CD. After inserting the CD in the drive, XP installed OK. However, now XP does not recognize any of the many programs I have on the hard drive; none of the software came up in the Start "All Programs" menu. I can't figure a way to get XP to recognize all my software! Short of wiping off the disk, is there any way to get XP to recognize the programs on disk and restore them to the "All Programs" section of the Start menu?

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

[afv-13]

your little brother did it!!!

what happened is that your registry got wiped clean.
if you backed up your registry like all good little boys do, just restore the backup.
if not you few options: uninstall all the programs and then install them again or install the programs again on top of the old installation.

dont know what else will work, sorry.

[Mike37]

Well, I only have a backup I made for my Win98 OS. Just got XP up and running and, unfortunately, hadn't made a new backup. I don't suppose the old Win98 backup will help, right?