98 crash, recover, XP Home upgrade...oops

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Guest

ok, so the week of hell began with my 98SE crashing, which I was only able to recover by reinstalling 98SE (after replacing a video card, hours on the phone with Microsoft support, etc...). When I did, the contents of My Documents had disappeared and previously installed files (like excel) were still there in Program Files, but not in Add/Remove Programs and wouldn't run from the .exe files. So, I got the bright idea to upgrade to XP Home in the hopes it would fix all my troubles ;

What I'm wondering about is Partitions. Since many of the old files are still on the hard drive, I'm hoping that they are still there and either on a partition I can't see or in a directory I can't access. I don't know a lot about partitions, or why I have a 2 Gb D: drive, but I was hoping to find out is if it's likely my files are still "in there" somewhere or not..

THANKS!
 
Hi Kerry,

Sounds like Win98 was installed to a new folder without formatting. Look in
the file structure for both a C:\Windows and a C:\Windows.000 - if both
exist chances are your old files are in the former folder. The programs
don't run as they aren't installed under the new installation folder, the
solution is to reinstall them.

Installing WinXP Home is not the answer. In fact, if things aren't quite
right in the system doing so could make things worse. Enlist the help of a
knowledgable friend to sort out the system. The D drive, it is is a hard
drive partition, is probably just a FAT16 volume (2GB is the upper size
limit). Without knowing a whole lot more about your system, it would not be
possible to correctly guide you.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Windows
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone
 
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