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The laptop mentioned is above is almost the sole focus of this inquiry. The new one I bought isn't important yet.
Today, I went out and bought a new Toshiba Satellite that has an Win Vista Home Premium on it. At the urgent behest of the sales rep, I also bought a 512 Seagate external USB HDD, which I thought would allow me to move files from the Win98 SE laptop to the Vista laptop.
What I found out upon attempting to install the Seagate drive was: a) Win98 SE requires drivers for all external USB drives and there is no driver CD included with this device and b) Even if there had been, it wouldn't have worked because the Seagate is an NTFS drive and not compatible with FAT32 Win98 SE.
So... Is there anything out there, anything at all, be it cables, thumb drives, Zip drives, what have you... that would allow me to move my files from this Win98 SE laptop to the Vista Home Prem laptop?
Thank you for any help in this farce of a situation I find myself in.
You can use a USB flash drive with Windows 98, but you may have to install drivers. The flash drives normally don't come with the Win98 drivers, but you can usually download them from the manufacturers' websites.
And flash drives are a lot cheaper than an external hard drive...
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An option would be to remove the hard drive from the old laptop and connect it to the new one with an inexpensive ($8.99) USB2IDE adapter.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?in...
I'm not sure if that one has a laptop adapter, but there are some that do.
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I'm still a fan of the external zip drives. They're pretty cheap on ebay. I know the parallel and USB ones will work with 98. The drivers are here.
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Just a heads up. Many, if not most, of the newer flash drives don't have drivers for Win98. Guess they figured there just sasn't enough need to justify the effort.
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If indeed your USB disk is NTFS, get anything of value off of it onto your new system, and from there format it to FAT32.
Get the drivers jam provided (Post #1) onto the old 98 laptop, get them installed, connect, and get your files.
It's a good day when you learn something
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I'd try booting a light Linux live CD such as Damn Small Linux (suited to old systems) to see if it will mount the external Seagate (format to FAT32 as suggested above) drive. Burn CD at slowest speed possible for easier booting in old drives.
If the Tecra does not boot live CDs,the Damn Small Linux boot floppy may help. Their forums are a good source of support for obsolete hardware.
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Thank you for the replies. Yes, I believe the packing mentioned the external drive is NTFS. I ordered a thumb flash drive from Radioshack and downloaded the driver for it from the site. I'll pick up the thumb drive from the store tomorrow and report back on the results. If that doesn't work, I will download the driver that was mentioned and try to use the Seagate drive again.
Good computer, crappy Net connection. I just can't win.
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I can't believe networking wasn't mentioned.
If your old laptop had a network connection be it wired or wireless you could have shared the drive of your old laptop on a network and simply copied the files right to your new laptop, desktop, etc.Nothing needed but some kind of network adapter in the older laptop and a cable.
Oh yea and a network don't care if it's FAT, NTFS, etc.
MSI K8N Neo
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.21ghz
1GB DDR 3200
nVidia 128mb FX 5200
WD 120gb SE
NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW
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