About 2 hours ago made a "house call" to some very good friends of our family.

Their computer was having problems. Why is it that I can never get a more accurate description out of people ?

So I grabbed my cd storage thingy filled with all kinds useful things. (installs for windows 98SE/ME/2000+SP2/xp-home+sp2/xp pro+sp2, some Linux distro's like ubuntu and fedora and a number of live cds with recovery tools)

When I got there the pc(win 98SE) was doing a surface check of the HD and was 93% done. I waited it out and tried the boot the pc normally. Windows loading screen with the clouds popped op and after a second or two it started to report disk errors.

I rebooted it after telling it to retry 5 times. When it rebooted I first got the "cover previously removed" warning (they have always had that one.) and then a error about memory being faulty followed by an error stating the memory size had been changed since the last boot.

The disk check came up again. Waited it out again. (got the warning about surface errors and that the information should be backed up and the hd possibly replaced.)

Errors after that again. So I booted it in DOS did a chkdsk(got pissed when I remembered that its gimped in WIN98) did scandisk. same error. Tried to delete some stupid files while I was there and got a disk read error doing that.

After discussing it with the guy went for a format and a reinstall off 98. (used my own cd since I trust those more then theirs.) after formatting and having the installer move files to the hd it rebooted and ..... yay more errors.

Advised them to at least replace the HD or possibly the entire pc .(partially because of the memory errors although I have no idea what caused them. And to do their daughters a pleasure since they want to move off the 450MHz to something faster and I don't blame them)

My question. Is there anything else I could have done to fix this, and was it a good idea to advice replacement of the hd/pc ?