I swaped this weekend to anew machine which runs under Win98. Before starting it i have saved the whole weekend my data on CD's. Most of the downloaded files where saved, except my WIP-stuff, all my mail-adresses and bookmarks. When i came at home this evening i wanted to save those things which where really important for me. But unfortunately the drive C: reported a Kernel-error. All this stuff sits on the drive F: which is a 13Gigs harddrive which is formatted as 8 Gigs NTFS under WinNT with Service-pack 3. Then i tryed to hang this on the new machine under Win98 as a primary-slave and made the Bios-settings manually. But seems Win98 can't handle NTFS-formattes drives. Now three questions: 1. as i have placed this drive on Win98, is there anything broken on the drive ? 2. is there anyway how this drive can be restored ? 3. is there a chance that this drive can be connected under another WinNT-machine and would run that i can save the data there ? I really need each comment and suggestion. Thanks. SHARKEY

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. :-)

Sharkey, I'd suggest running a cross-over (2-way!) aethernet cable between two computers and set up file-sharing between them (a very small LAN). I'm linking PCs and Macs and it is somewhat problematical (I'm NOT a computer-person) but files put into a folder on one machine can be accessed by the other. Years ago I used a program called LapLink, which contained a serial cable, and it would link computers in a similar way, so that files could be copied or even worked on from another machine. I hope that you can retrieve that data! Carolly

Attached Link: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml

mi-scha, I'm gklad someone could prove me wrong on pt.2 If that works, it will be a lot easier than other solutions. :-)

Oh yes 2. Linux can also read NTFS drives ;)

Looks like you will have to reinstall NT, the service pack, copy the data, convert the NTFS partition to FAT32 and install Win98. NTFS partitions are not accesible to Win98. There are a few programs that can force Win98 to do it but it is not native to Win98. I doubt the data on the NTFS drive is damaged at all. good luck, FlyerX

Hell, why keep Win98 on it at all? It's a brand new machine... upgrade or reload the beast under Windows 2000 ( a far better OS than 98 or NT ) and then hang your drive off it directly. No reason in the world (technical reason, that is) to load a new machine with Win98 these days.

Huhh Guys, thanks a lot, you saved my night. With your suggestions for the question No.1 i'm happy, absolutelly happy. Because have NT at work. Seems i have to stay up early in the morning to check this. And if it runs, i can do the CD-burning at work. If not then i save the needed NT files from my machine at work and try if i can do it with the NTFS-driver which mi-scha suggested. If this works, you don't know how much time and work you saved for me. It's more then 300 hours of modelling which is at the moment useless. Again, thanks a lot and please cross your fingers. SHARKEY

Thanks soulhuntre, but i have spent all money on this new machine. It's a AMD-Athlon 1Ghz with a TNT-32Mb graphic-card and 128Megs of RAM and a DVD. On this machine there was Win98 preinstalled. And unfortunately i haven't Win2000 nor Money to buy it. First i thinked to install NT on the new Comp, but my brother let me know that Win98 would be better for all those 3D-things. Sometimes the easier way isn't the faster. LOL But i got a second highlight this evening, Poser-renders where really fast with it. For what i needed with those old Pentium120 more then 10 minutes will run now i a few seconds. It really wipes over the screen, it's just to cool. SHARKEY

Did you get the files off you ntfs drive?

Sharkey, I'm not claiming to be any super user, but I worked for a company a little over a year ago where we supported over 2000 machines. Also, I have built several machines, and fixed a bunch of machines on a freelance basis. If you are looking for stability, you might consider switching away from Windows 98 to an operating system with less problems. Here's what I've found in several different cases on Windows 98 machines. If you install Win 98 to a formatted harddrive it will work for several months with no problems, but if you are a hardcore user who transfers alot of data to and from your harddrive, installing and uninstalling software, or downloading and creating files (image files, doc files, etc.), you have to constantly defrag your drives in Win98 to keep your system error free. The only problem is, scandisk stops running in Windows 98 after awhile, and you won't be able to defrag your system when that happens, so the system slowly degrades into dysfunctionality. If you don't plan to play any games on your system, NT is still one of the most reliable systems, and Windows 2000 is also great if you can tolerate downloading and installing a patch for every single program.

Goldvice, That sounds like the problem I have... can no longer defrag this system.... and Win98 is flaky as breakfast cereal. Would reinstalling the OS correct the scandisk problem? I don't want to format (and risk losing data) yet the machine is barely a year old. Carolly

Yeppiaiehhh. I was abble to install the drive at work. Have had a little trouble while the Bios haven't found the drive, but have downwrited the settings from the old machine. And with them it had worked. Now a day is going to end on which i could say: Burn CD, burn. A lot of Gigs after 9 hours with permanent burning aside the daily-work. I'm really happy because i have back all my stuff, especially the WIP's. Thanks Goldvice for your tip, may i have to buy a new drive with the next money and build it up with NT. I play Games allways on my sons old Pentium150. LOL Each time when he goes in the book-library he come at home with a new one. But after half an hour i had enough played. Don't know why, but games can't attract me for long. SHARKEY

Good that you got it working. Carolly, there is a small chance that reinstalling will help, but that has always been my first fix and it has never worked to fix the scandisk problem. There are supposed fixes you can find in web tech forums, but I've not gotten any of those to work either. I think there might even be some retail programs that claim to fix the problem, but I have never been able to get together enough cash to experiment with them. You can also try booting into "Safe Mode" and running scandisk. If it works, then great, if not, then you might have use the system as is, unless you are prepared to reformat. If you're going to reformat, I recommend storing the information on different harddrives, or burn it to CD. Once you have backed up all your information, use a utility to reset the drive to zero, and then fdisk and reformat from there. For someone who is istalling on a bare harddrive, I recommend setting everything up exactly the way they are going to use it and then Rawread or Ghost the data and store it on a separate drive.

This drive is partitioned, so that C should only be system stuff. However, with Windows that includes the mailbox/browser/downloads, etc. until I can get data moved into the other sections. A lot of stuff passes through the C partition. sigh. I'll look into some of those programs when I have a cash flow again. Thanks, Carolly