SOCIAL: Calling all geeks!

[Brian Rice]

If it's a Windows 98 box, the filesystem on the disk will be FAT, which any 
Windows machine, even very recent ones, will happily read and write.  So 
that's what I'd suggest: attach the disk as a slave drive to a modern 
computer running, say, XP.  Ideally, use an XP box that you've backed up or 
has no critical data on it.  I can't think of any way that attaching the 
drive could hose the rest of the system, but of course Windows has surprised 
me before.

Yes, scandisk will run.  Just let it run.  Go have a burrito (they don't 
have those here in Singapore).

I have used Ontrack to recover disks before, but if you're seeing files at a 
DOS prompt, you probably don't need their services.

Good luck!
Brian

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Seymour" <bobsey at cfmc.com>
To: "Social" <social at deeptrouble.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:44 AM
Subject: SOCIAL: Calling all geeks!


> Hey Folks -
>  I haven't had much luck trying to help Grace's neighbor salvage some
> files from her corrupted hard drive and I'm looking for some advice.
> It has some semblance of Windows 98 on it but even with the aid of a
> boot disk, we can't get things running.  It gets into a horribly long
> and tedious scandisk routine that I have to quit out of due to
> impatience.  When I quit out of the routine, I can see a dos directory
> of the files but cannot do anything with the files because, well, it's
> dos.  For all I know, the files are screwed up, but it seemed so
> tantalizingly close.  I next tried to add the drive to an existing
> Windows 98 machine as a slave drive to see what would happen but
> unfortunately my old Windows 98 machine seems to not be working, even
> with a reinstall of the software.  My questions are as follows:
>  - Does anyone have any suggestions as to what else could be done?
>  - Does anyone have a Windows 98 machine that we can mount the hard
> drive on?
>  - Can anyone recommend a professional hard drive salvager?
>
> Thanks
> _______________________________________________
> social mailing list
> social at lists.deeptrouble.com
> http://lists.deeptrouble.com/listinfo.cgi/social-deeptrouble.com
>