A friend is a writer and needs to save important data off his old computer with a very corrupted win 95. I tried everything. It would not boot even in safety mode and Norton utiities did not help though it can read the 2GB hard drive and I can see bits of data here and there. When booting I just keep getting fatal errors. I tried to reformat using the original win 95 disk but it just hung evn though I had used setup to ensure CD read only. Dos does not appear to work properly. Anyway, I thought I would try to load my win 98SE. It autobooted fine and it seemed to work and just about got to the end of the installation process. It repaired literally hundreds of corrupt filenames. Unfortunately the root file is now full with 512 files and the instruction is to save root directories elsewhere. I cannot so the installation does not complete. The only option seems to be to delete the remaining files so as to at least save some data. An unusual case but can anyone please help? Ray

You've probably ALREADY destroyed any of the files he wanted to save. "tryed to reformat" I don't know just why you would "reformat" the drive when you are trying to save files. The drive is probably toast. He should have backed up his files some other way a long time ago, by other means, tape, CD, floppies, whatever, even a second hard drive. The only thing I can suggest is to pop the drive into a second computer that has a KNOWN healty, virus free hard drive, and run scandisk and a good virus scan on it. Try and copy what files you can off it. from there. I think the drive is toast. I think his files are gone.

Whoops. What am I talking about? I did not mean reformat at all - a typo error! Of course I meant I tried to re-install Win 95 to correct the win 95 errors. The corrupted hard drive is still intact. Actually using Norton to scan the disk surface there are no bad sectors so one of his kids must have deleted important files or something else. The rest of my message is still the same. Sorry about the confusion between reinstall and reformat - a pretty deadly confusion eh? Ray

FAT16 drives (as in win95A) are limited to 512 root entries - this includes directories in addition to files. As well, long filenames can use more than one entry, so 512 is decidedly optimistic. It might be a good idea to delete some files from the root - bound to be quite a few of limited value, such as any *.chk files from scandisk or Norton's *._dd etc - unless they contain any salvageable data (doubtful, but maybe) What are you hoping to do - repair the OS or just recover files?? File recovery might be simpler if you install the drive as a slave or secondary master in another machine as suggested. "Anyway, I thought I would try to load my win 98SE" Confused - what OS is currently on the machine, or which one are you trying to run on it? 98% of all statistics are made up

Thanks jboy. The machine's os is win 95. I tried to put the hard drive in my own computer as a slave drive but it just booted into win 95 when I tried to access the drive even though I had defaulted to my own win 98se. The reason I tried win 98 se was in the hope of trying to recover some of the files even if they were renamed as I could locate them and as they are all word files could read them with word or notepad or similar. When I used Norton utilities there were so many windows corrupt files that I could not recover, neither could I boot up the original 95 disk - hence i thought win 98 might give me some chance of recovering some data using the existing programs on the hard drive. Ray

Ok - here's the thing - if you connected the drive in your 98 box as a primary slave (or secondary master) there is no way the machine should start Windows 95. When connecting a 2nd HDD, you (usually) have to change the hard drive jumpers on one or both drives, depending. Almost always there is a jumper diagram on the drive, showing you the settings for 'master' 'slave' and (sometimes) 'single' Yes, slaving the drive on another Win9x machine will make recovery simpler - but it's not likely that long filenames would have been preserved on recovered files - things are going to be a mess no matter what. 98% of all statistics are made up

After all the "goings on" I too share the pessimism about retrieving anything much. You say that the majority of the important files are Word (which have the extension .doc). A bit late but I would pop in the boot disk and then get to Command prompt only. As most folk keep Word docs in My Documents (or sub folders off that)I would then do this: Type cd mydocu~1 and look for any files shown as DOC. These can be copied to floppies. You might also find sub-directories. Go into these by using the cd command (cd bookfile for example will take you to that sub-folder). You read the sub-folders off the DOS screen. In each sub-folder you again copy the DOC files to floppies. If you want to go back then use cd.. and then you can enter the next sub-folder and so on. What you do with any .doc files you save depends on what software you have available. If you have another machine with the same or a later version of Word then they should load onto it fine. If all else fails change their extensions from .doc to .wri and you will at least get the bulk of the readable part displayed. With time and patience the original documents can then be reformed with at least the basis to go on. If you had .doc files stored elsewhere other than My Documents (dos name mydocu~1) then it is a case of remembering the folders they were placed in and finding them using DOS. We can help further if necessary. Sadly there was far too much intervention after the event. At the time things failed quite a lot could have been saved even if this meant a fist full of floppies. The current situation is hard to imagine. Derek.W