jchappj

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Jan 16, 2001
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OK, I screwed up and now I need some help:
My comp was running PIII with Win98, 20G drive (7200 Deskstar). I upgraded the MB to Asus A7V + Athlon 1100. Bought new 40G Deskstar, formatted and loaded WinXP Pro. My thought was I could add my original drive after getting the 'new' comp set up and access all my (Win98) files. Once I added the drive though, WinXP (and my Bios) could see the old drive but wouldn't let me access it. I thought maybe the boot sector on the (old) drive was keeping me out, so I used IBM's disk maintenance program to boot from floppy then delete it (the boot sector only). That didn't work. So then I wiped out my new drive that has WinXP and reloaded Win98
on it, thinking I could retrieve the data then start over (yes, I kick myself for not saving the data on disk ahead of time believe me!!) Once up and running I added my old drive again but still can't access the files. Sorry for the long post to get to the question but does anyone have ideas of how to access my old drive to pull my data? Thanks for any and all help!
Jack
 

HammerBot

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Jun 27, 2002
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That one scores high one the 'strange' list. There should be no problem accessing a win98 formatted drive form wxp.
Could you explain in more detail exactly what happens when you attempt to access files on the W98 drive. Can you see the drive under W98. Can you see any directories files etc.

Deleting the MBR may have been a very bad move, since you may also have deleted the partition information. In that case, you will need some kind of datarecovery program. I recommend <A HREF="http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm" target="_new">Get Data Back</A>

<i><b>Engineering is the fine art of making what you want from things you can get</b></i>
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