"philo" wrote in message
...

"Chris Watts" wrote in message
...
My Windows 98SE machine has just failed after years of good service -
BIOS
problem I think.
I have removed its hard drive, fitted it into a usb enclosure and
connected
it to my XP Pro laptop.
The drive has several partitions on it, most of which are FAT32 or FAT -
these are all readable.
But one partition has been compressed using drvspace and this is, of
course,
not readable directly by XP.
Is there any way that I can read it and copy off the data (about 2 GB)?
I
no longer have access to a working 98 machine.



I don't know any way of reading it from XP...
however if you clear off enough space on one of the other partitions on
the
drive...
you can bootup with a win98 floppy (one which loads the comprssion driver
of
course)
then copy the data off the compressed volume to another partiton

Thanks for that idea - I will investgate further.
There are some problems though. My XP laptop doesn't have a floppy. My
98desktop does but that is the one that is giving problems. If do what you
suggest (booting from a floppy) surely a USB-attached drive will not be
readable?

What would happen if I just copy drvspace onto my XP machine and run it from
a command prompt? Would that trash anything?

TIA
Chris