I am currentlyt trying to get the data off of a old laptop (win (98) harddrive onto my native machine.

I have purchased the external laptop drive cradel and have it plugged into my PC tower. All seems well except i cannot get disk manager to assign a drive number to it.

Does this have anythign to do with the fact that it is a FAT32 drive?

Ideas?

NTFS can read FAT32 but not visa versa.

Is the drive detected under My Computer?

Another hardware option is an internal adapter:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5160538.html#

My computer does not see it because there is no drive numebr that gets assigned to it. Could this be the result of a jumper setting issue with the drive?

That behavior generally indicates that XP does not detect a formatted drive.

If it were a new drive then the solution would be to format it.

As you have data that you want to retrieve I would check the jumper. If it is Master set it to slave.

I don't know what type of cradle you are using but an internal adapter might be more successful.

I have curtailed the whole problem entirely by simply using knoppix to allow me to dump the drive content off the laptop onto a standard HD. No need for the external laptop drive now.

NOW i need to try and format the laptop drive in order to re-install. Trouble being there that the WIN98 install disk detects a "problem" with the drive (thanks for the feedback 98!)... now i need to figure out a disk utility i can use to do this... THEN install 98... i hate computers.

See if anything here helps:

http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/

http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/

Actually it turned out that the HD needed a low level format, so i went to

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/l...el-format.html

and got the utility i needed. Once the HD was sparklingly clean, the win98 install went off without a hitch!

Thanks for all the help!

Thanks for the update and the thanks!

Let us know if we can help further in the future.

If you want this thread reopened just PM me.