I'm not an expert, but this may help. 1.) No, there shouldn't be any damage to the drive, having been placed in a Win98 machine. Some people set up dual boot systems with Win98 on one drive and WinNT/2000 on another. While the NTFS drive can't be accesed from with in Win98, the drive and the partition are unharmed. 2.) I don't know if there is a utility that can transfer data off of a NTFS drive, since NTFS support is related to the OS, I don't think so, but I might be wrong. So, recovering the data while in Win98? Probably not, but as above, the data is still there, unharmed. 3.) Yes, definitely. You should be able to attach the drive to another computer with NT and access the drive. You will then need some way to transfer those files onto your Wn98 machine. If you find someone with NT that can hook up your drive for you and they have enough spare HD space, they could transfer all of your stuff onto their HD, reformat your NT drive to a non-NTFS format, then transfer all your files back to your HD. Or, you could buy an additional HD, set up your Win98 machine with a dual boot set up, installing NT on the new HD you just bought, which would allow you to access the NTFS drive on your own system. If you go the dual boot route, research how to do that online. It isn't very difficult, you can set it up so that on boot up, ou can select which OS to run. :-)