Cant open 98 files from XP

[funhousegroup]

OK
My buddies XP HD crashed and was acting like it was toast. We could not boot from it and we could not repair it with the windows disk. It also was making a bad sound. I tried to slave it to the new HD that I installed XP on but for some stupid reason the old one was in FAT32 and when I tried to convert it to ntfs I kept getting an error that read .. command not availasble for raw drives. So then I popped it in a 98 machine and slaved it and was able to copy the needed docs onto the hd of the 98 machine. From there I made afloppy of the files to put on the new XP hd. Unfourtunatley I am not able to open the files in XP probably because the OS I used to copy them to the floppy was 98 and most likely FAT32. Now when I try to open the floppy files in XP it says disk is not formatted or if it does open a file I looks like martian in notepad. I wonder if the word docs will open ok after I install Word? What I really am looking for is a way to convert these files into an XP readable format.
HHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLP PLEASE
fh

[funhousegroup]

Also .
Does anyone know what directory the email inbox and mail and setting swould be in on the od XP drive so that I can copy it over.
Thanks

fUnhOuSEgRouP

[Paul Komski]

They will look like "martian" in notepad and just need to be opened with word. You could also try "Open With" and choose Interenet Explorer to view them. If you dont currently have word installed you could download Word Viewer (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en) to read the files or get hold of open office.

There should be absolutely no difficulty in reading Files on a FAT32 partition and there is absolutely no reason to attempt to convert them to NTFS for WinXP to read them. WinXP can read FAT and NTFS. Win98 can only read FAT.

[funhousegroup]

Thank you Paul,
I see know that you are right. I had several files that were just merely corrupted. Sorry about the panic. I just spent the better part of the day trying to recover their data and suddenly thought I was back to square one.
Cheers, FH

[classicsoftware]

Floppies are about as reliable for data transfer as toilet paper is for your doctoral thesis.

I can't tell you how many times I put a file on a floppy bring it to another PC and then FUBAR......

I would put the drive into the new machine and copy the files from there......

Depending on what e-mail program you have the data will be in C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\??????

[ErnieK]

For future reference:
The easiest/safest way of keeping and obtaining a backup of your OE folders etc it to set the default folder onto a 2nd drive or partition. You can then just copy this folder onto a seperate disk for future restoration.

To do this open OE and go to OPTIONS/MAINTENANCE/STORE FOLDER and change the location. By doing this if oyu ever lose the C:\ drive you retain all your settings and any mails you have stored in there.

[funhousegroup]

The thing is that I tryed to slave the old drive to the new one in the same XP PC but it could not read from the old XP FAT32 drve to the new XP NTFS drive and when I tryed to convert the file structure I just got an error saying "Cannot convert raw drives"

[Paul Komski]

Cannot convert raw drives
The only time I have seen drives reported as RAW is when they are unformatted or damaged.

[funhousegroup]

Yeah it was damaged.