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I figured I could walk her through using the Western Digital utilities to write zeros to the drive
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There's really no point in doing that, unless you just don't like the idea of a virus' bytes on the disk somewhere until it is overwritten.
As long as the existing partition is correct, all you need to do is an FDISK /MBR to make sure there are no viruses in the Master Boot Record.
Can you install 98 with a FORMAT /S or SYS command? (I skipped that one.) Does it fit on one CD? If so, after making a clean install of 98, you could:
1. Create a boot floppy with the 98 DOS. Basically, go to the MS-DOS prompt and FORMAT A: /S
2. Copy FDISK, the DOS CD-ROM driver, MSCDEX, FORMAT, and XCOPY to the floppy.
3. Load the CD-ROM driver in the CONFIG.SYS, and run MSCDEX in AUTOEXEC.BAT so you can see the CD-ROM drive (usually as D: )
4. At the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT, do something like:
FORMAT C: /S
XCOPY D:\ C:\ /S/E
FDISK /MBR
@pause WAIT TEN SECONDS AND REBOOT....
5. Make a bootable CD-ROM from that floppy. Don't finalize the CD.
6. Burn the clean install of 98 as the second session on the CD.
So at this point, you have a bootable CD that will boot, load the CD-ROM driver so that the clean install is accessible as D:, format the existing C: drive and copy the hidden system files, copy everything else over, and rewrite the MBR just in case. There would be a few dire warnings and prompts, but all she'd have to do is press Y and/or Enter.
Hmm, I wonder if you'll have to fiddle with the MSDOS.SYS file because of the BootGUI option. In that case, you might also need ATTRIB to make the file modifiable.
Anyway, if you can install 98 with FORMAT, then this should definitely be doable. Of course, you really need to test this, ideally with CD-R/W so you don't make coasters. Unless you have two Vectras, after you setup 98, you'd burn that onto its own CD, or copy everything onto another computer so you can burn it in step 6 above.
