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Win98 setup destroyed my FAT hosed my hard drive
Here's a challenge if anyone is up for it. I'll explain the setup.
I had Win98 First Edition running on my PC and had just purchased WinXP Home in plans of upgrading.
First, I put a new motherboard in it and instead of going through the process of reformating and then reinstalling everything, I thought that maybe I could just put the new motherboard in, let Win98 recognize it and I could install the drivers for it with the CD that came with the new motherboard. Then once I got Win98 stable with the new motherboard, I could install WinXP.
Unfortunately, Win98 would not boot all the way with the new motherboard. It showed the Win98 screen for a while, then shut down the PC. This happened every time I tried. It would load up in Safe Mode, but the CD-ROM wasn't recognizable in Safe Mode, so I could not load the new motherboard's drivers.
So then I thought, why don't I try running the Win98 setup again? I only had the Win98SE install disk on me but I thought it should work. Wrong again. After a little ways into the setup I get this abrupt error message saying that this version of the installation could not upgrade this operating system. Apparently the Win98 SE install disk I had was not an upgrade to Win98 first edition.
So I exited out the setup program. And to my shock and dismay I found that my hard drive was hosed! Instead of all the files being there, there were four files with gobbledy-gook characters.
I ran Partition Magic and it said that the partition was unformatted.
So...it's all gone! Everything. Somehow the file structure has been corrupted by the Win98 setup. What is going on here?
Any clues, or ways to get my data back? Please help, thanks.
Rehlin
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