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General discussion

98SE doesn't see a HDD

Feb 19, 2004 11:29PM PST

I have an older hard drive (4.3 GB partitioned to two drives) that was operating in an NT. I need some files from it on a 98SE, so installed it on the 98SE. I did the BIOS change to look for the drive -- Primary Drive one. It doesn't show up on My Computer, but it does show up in BIOS as a 4.3 Gig drive. The 98SE computer is an older Dell.

What I want to do is get a backup of a couple programs and restore the data into newly loaded programs.

Discussion is locked

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Re:98SE doesn't see a HDD
Feb 20, 2004 12:49AM PST

My guess is that the drive is formatted with the NTFS file system, which is unreadable by Windows 98. You'll need to reformat the two partitions before you can use the drive.

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Re:98SE doesn't see a HDD.. My tool to get that data...
Feb 20, 2004 1:47AM PST
http://tips.oncomputers.info/archives2004/0401/2004-Jan-11.htm

I can boot a KNOPPIX CD and the 98 and NTFS drives can be explored and one can copy the data files off from NTFS to the 98 drives.

Fair warning. Windows "programs" do not move with a "copy" since there are registry entries, shared DLLs and more. This is the way of things since about 1995.

Bob
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NTFS
Feb 20, 2004 2:37AM PST

Other possibilities:
1. Mount the HDD on a NT or XP machine and burn everything you want on a CD. The CD can be read then in Windows 98.
2. Try a NTFS-reader for DOS on the Win 98 machine. Googling with dos ntfs reader download will give you information on such a tool. I've got no practical experience with it. But it might provide you with a file copy from NTFS to FAT32 (the Windows 98 filesystem).
3. Use a tool like Partition Magic to change the partition back from NTFS to FAT32 (see http://www.buildorbuy.org/ntfstofat32.html for preparatory details).


Kees

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Re:NTFS
Feb 21, 2004 7:35AM PST

Thanks. This makes sense. My problem with getting into the replys was that I had bookmarked the wrong address and was only getting a listing, but no access. I appreciate your help.