My boss installed XP on his Windows 98 station, what a mess!

[bkonner]

Howdy,

My boss installed Windows XP on his Windows 98 SE PC. It first deleted all his files on his folder on one of the servers (I am serious--Thank God for Tape backups!). All users are required to save their files on what we call the "H" Drive. Any way, believe it or not, that is not the problem.

The problem is, he did something today; God knows what. It will now not boot. It checks the disk, then reboots. It is on a FAT 32 partition, so essentially all I really need to do is get some of his documents off the "desktop". Nevertheless, I can not boot to safe mode, safe mode with networking, or even command prompt. There is a repair utility, which I do not understand. Oh, yeah, and of course he did not create a restore disk (YES!). I know very little about XP. We bought a couple of copies to do some testing. I am a UNIX guy.

Any suggestions on how I may be able to reboot his computer to at least recover (some what easily) some of his files? Also, where is the desktop directory? There is a directory called "copy of desktop". Again, I know little to nothing about XP.

Oh yeah, did I say HELP?

Thanks,

 

[teado]

Create a Win98 boot floppy disk on another machine. If the hard drive is formatted as FAT32, I think that by booting up with the Win98 floppy disk, you'll be able to see the hard drive (I assume it's the 'C:' drive). If there's not that many files, and they are less than the 1.4MB of a floppy disk, you should be able to navigate to the desktop directory and hopefully copy what was on his desktop to the floppy drive (you might need several floppy disks).

I haven't had the unfortunate luck of not being able to get into XP, but this method has saved me a few times with 2000, etc. Also, I am sure there's a better way to do it, but this might be quickest to recover the documents. Good luck.

 

[NZWar]

You will find the desktop under a folder called Documents and Settings, in there you will find the username. if doing this from a dos level, you might need to use dir /a to show all directories, but it should be under a folder <username>\desktop, eg username is roger so therefore under Documents and Settings\Roger\Desktop is where all the desktop icons are. To get to the dos prompt use a win98 bootdisk and just go to the drive


Hope this helps you somewhat

 

[NZWar]

actually when you are in a command prompt the directory is more likely to be called docume~1. Sorry about that