Need a read a Windows 98 hard drive in Vista

Over Clocker

Over Clocker

Over Clocker

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
9,712
Location
Retired Don
Hi guys,

A friend's really old PC has died. I've removed their old hard drive and put it into my caddy, Windows Vista sees the physical drive, but cannot read from it, and is unable to specifiy a drive letter etc for it. Is sees the partition but does not list a file system.

Is there anything I can do to this to make it readable??

Also have an XP laptop if that helps.

Cheers,

Mal
 
If it's from a 98 machine then it's going to be FAT32 which anything should be able to read. I assume from the fact that Disk Management sees a drive that it's spinning up OK and not making any daft noises?

Check the left hand column (the grey bit) in Disk Management and make sure there isn't a wee red icon next to the 98 drive, it may just need initialised to let DM deal with the disk.
 
rpstewart said:
If it's from a 98 machine then it's going to be FAT32 which anything should be able to read. I assume from the fact that Disk Management sees a drive that it's spinning up OK and not making any daft noises?

Check the left hand column (the grey bit) in Disk Management and make sure there isn't a wee red icon next to the 98 drive, it may just need initialised to let DM deal with the disk.
Click to expand...

Hi, Yep is spinning and comes in DM as healthy 20GB partition, but with no file system. Nope doesn't need initialising either!

Is quite odd!

Thanks,

Mal
 
The only other thing which springs to mind is did the 98 machine have any of the Norton tools on it? Norton used to set the partition type to something bizarre to prevent it being altered by Disk Management and the like. The details are a bit hazy but it's maybe worth investigating.
 
it's worth running testdisk on it (first google will find it, bundled with 'photorec')

it's a dos style app, but can run from windows, it scans drives for missing partitions and just rewrites the table (and therefore, recovers the data directly to that drive)


run a scan with that to see if it finds any partitions on the drive -no harm if it doesn't

as rp said, vista should be able to read it no problem
 
bledd. said:
it's worth running testdisk on it (first google will find it, bundled with 'photorec')

it's a dos style app, but can run from windows, it scans drives for missing partitions and just rewrites the table (and therefore, recovers the data directly to that drive)


run a scan with that to see if it finds any partitions on the drive -no harm if it doesn't

as rp said, vista should be able to read it no problem
Click to expand...

^this. This tool has got me out of some sticky situations like the one above.
 
Just a thought, did the Windows 98 Machine die because of the hard drive? There is a chance that errors on the disk are preventing the partition from being read correctly despite it booting fine.
 
Cheers guys. Used test disk but the drive was still unavail in Windows. Tried 3 different PCs!

I was however able to copy the files with testdisk. Great app!!
 
i brought a caddy kit from well known high street electronics store, £20 or somthing and that will allow me to connect any hard drive, sata, ide 2.5 or 3.5 via the cable. works a treat
 
works a treat hey, used it a few times now, find it works better on vista than xp through, often have to reboot or use the drives with my xp laptop.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom