[robgee]

Can anyone please tell me if there is a way of installing win 98se on a usb external hard drive (i.e. boot from floppy).

I need to do this since the hard disk on my notebook probably got hit with a virus. By installing win 98se on the usb external hard drive I hope to attempt to salvage what I can from the internal hard drive. Once I've done done that I can reinstall win 98 se on the internal hard drive of the notebook.

 

[johnwill]

I doubt you'll get it running that way. I'd suggest getting a 2.5"-3.5" IDE adapter (less than $10) and temporarily install the drive into a standard machine to salvage files and clean up the disk.

 

[robgee]

John,

Thanks for the input.

Sorry I don't have any old pistols.

Rob

 

[johnwill]

No problem, I'll take new pistols too!

 

[x5dr]

can you boot with the notebook? if so run online virus scans

http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

I'm curious if anyone knows...can you install the OS on the USB drive as a LOGICAL partition?

Also...aren't you just transferring the virus?

 

[johnwill]

W98 (MS-DOS) will only boot from the first primary partition. I think just removing the drive and reading it in another machine is probably the most likely to be successful.

 

[robgee]

This is for x5dr's benefit:

My notebook wouldn't boot. I was able to examine the contents of the "c" by booting off the floppy drive. I didn't see anything recognizable. Files/Directories names had funny characters in them (they lloked like a deck of cards with a smily face on it). Unfortunately I ran Norton on the c drive which created a bunch of files/directories with the names of FILE001 to FILENNN and the same for the directories.

I found a product which might be able to recover my personal files. So therefore I don't want to trash the existing c drive by loading win98se on it. I was hoping to install win98se on the external usb hard drive and recover the c drive, and then reload win98se on the c drive (after I've taken what I can off of it).

I know this can be done with Unix on Sun. I have a buddy of mine that is a Unix/NT Admin. He's pretty confident I should be able to do it as well on win98se (i.e. by placing the usb hard drive drivers on the boot floppy). He suggested contacting Microsoft to see if this is doable and how to do it.

John's suggestion is a good one, however, I'm trying to avoid taked apart my notebook which I undertand is a tight area to work in. I would also think that would reuire me to have a desktop with win98se on it which I don't have (have the desktops but with different OS's).

Any input would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[x5dr]

anyway scanreg /restore would let you boot if you went to an earlier registry?..assuming you can get to command prompt.

(obviously guessing )

 

[johnwill]

Actually, your inclination NOT to do ANY more writing on the disk is a good one! At this point, I doubt that any process that involves more modification of the drive contents is a real good idea.

 

[Midnight Tech]

Rob, all the later model laptops have the hard drive in a fairly easy to remove assembly. Pull it out and get one of those adapters mentioned earlier... as long as it's a Win9x based os you should be safe to hook it up that way.

 

[x5dr]

you wouldn't be transferring the virus to another HD?

 

[johnwill]

A virus is only dangerous when you allow the code to run. I'd move all the data I could get to a new disk, then do a virus scan on that. It's NOT a good idea to attempt to write to a disk when you know it's failing. Even if the file tables are corrupted and not actually a physical defect, writing just makes a bigger mess.

If you talk to data recover folks, you'll find they don't screw around with the source drive, they copy off an image and tinker with that.