OS/Registry (W98)

[mrckmn]

In my device manager in windows 98,under the hard disk controller tab,in the secondary IDE controller ( dual fifo ),I have a yellow circle with a black ! mark in it,I know that means there is some sort of a conflict there.The only thing that I have plugged into the seconday controller right now is my cd-rom drive,previously I also had a cd-writer plugged into the same connection,I have since un-installed that drive.When I highlight the controller and click properties,I get the following information:
Device status
This device is not working properly because the BIOS in the device is reporting the resources for the device incorrectly ( Code 9 ) Contact the device manufacturer to get an updated BIOS for your device.
But now there's more..
I remembered that I had the cd-rom installation floppy disk,so I had the bright idea to try and re-install it,I should have never of done that,because now my computer is stuck in the dos mode( thank goodness I have a second computer ).After I did that,I got the notice that my config,sys & win.ini files had changed,did I want to save the changes,I chose yes,That's probably where I made my mistake.Isn't there some way to restore my machine to the way it was previously, registry,etc.,then in desperation,I stuck in the windows 98 cd and tried reloading the operating system again.Now it will try and boot back up,but never makes it all the way.In windows 98,isn't the registry supposed to be backed up for the previous 5 days,in case of a problem,you can get it restored to the state it was working correctly?I really don't want to format my hard drive,because I'll lose microsoft word,excel,etc.I know there must be some way to restore my system to it's previous working state.Thanks for any suggestions.
David

[mrckmn]

I formatted my hard drive,thank goodness I had the sense to buy a cd-writer some time ago,I backed up my hard drive with everything on it,even though it had windows 95,no big deal,I just upgraded to 98 again,and everything seems fine now.I pretty well have everything back to normal now,the only thing that perplexes me is now when I boot up,I have the HP(hewlett packard) folder pop on the screen with these items in it: HPAbout.cfg ,HPAbout.str ,HPButton.ocx ,HPCenter.str ,there was more than that in there,I already deleted everything else and that didn't cause any problems.Do you think I would be safe to delete the remaining four items ? If I could figure out how to keep that folder from loading at startup,that would be ok also.Thanks for listening..
David