So I stopped off at a relatives to check on their computer, (old Win98 machine, had been running slow) - disk (1.5G) was about 90% full and after cleaning up some temp files decided to run scandisk & defrag... well defrag was taking it's good old time (and seemed to keep restarting every now and then, even though I think I had disabled all other programs running (ie screensavers) which might have caused Defrag to hiccup... bottom line is it was making slow but steady progress.

Decided to let Defrag run it's course and left instructions just to leave the machine on, not mess with it and would check on it the next day (today) - just called over and was told "I was worried about the computer catching on fire so I turned it off last night" and "now it won't turn on at all"

(just hit the power button, no orderly shutdown of defrag)

Machine is probably due to be replaced anyway, but now am wondering if there will be any way to salvage whatever data was on the old one?

(I try to be patient, but why oh why when you tell someone not to do something do they decide that doing just the opposite is a good idea???

At this point I'd pull the drive and put into a known good machine to try and recover any data.  Don't bother with trying to get 98 to boot off it.

I've never seen a system running 98 that didn't need to be FDISK'ed and re-installed every 6 months or so to keep it running smoothly.

thanks, will give that a shot.

Possible power supply failure?

It is not good to shut off Win98 without going thru the power shut down routine, this is especially true when running scandisk because it is probably trying to repair broken chains.

Personally, I would go over and examine the machine personally, sounds like who ever owns the machine, is not too computer literate.

I agree.  Save off any data files you want to keep, reformat the machine, and install Windows XP on it (or at least Windows 2000 if you have a spare copy and don't want to buy XP).

Once a machine gets to a certain point, it's better to just cut your losses and use the "nuclear option".  

Once the new OS is on and patched, run a full disk scan just to make sure your problems weren't being caused by bad sectors or a hard drive that's on the verge of failing.

Oh, and them for not following your directions.  If they were worried, then unless smoke was coming out of the case, they should have called you first.

You can reinstall Win98 over top of the old installation and not ruin your programs and data.

I've seen this problem a million times. It's actually a typical bug with windows 98. On occasion the OS will become in such a state that it will refuse to defrag completely. The only thing you can do is reinstall the OS or upgrade the computer for windows 2000 or XP. Good luck.