OT - Win98 HDD can't be read by XP, now won't boot

[Ed Kolis]

Long story: Well, about 4 years ago my family replaced their computer because it wouldn't boot anymore - then it started working again, so we gave it to our grandparents because we'd already bought a newer, faster one. They never used it though, so yesterday I went and got it back from them for use as a web server. I was planning to ghost the hard drive drive over the network for safekeeping before wiping it and installing Linux, but Ghost didn't have a driver information file or something for my wireless NIC and it looked too complicated to set one up. So I took the hard drive out and put it in my WinXP PC as a second drive to ghost it from there, but my computer couldn't read it! I put it back in its original computer, and lo and behold, it froze at the boot screen just like it did 4 years ago! So, anyone know what I can do before I just give up and wipe the drive, seeing as there was little if anything of value actually on it (I just wanted to ghost it Just In Case (tm) )

Short(er? ) story: Anyone know what could cause a Win98 partition to be unreadable? The MBR seems to be fine because Win98 can boot to it, but neither Win98 or WinXP can actually read anything off of the drive - when booting it standalone in 98, it hangs after "booting to IDE-0: OK", and reading it in an XP machine as a second HDD says "drive E: cannot be read, format it?" I'm probably just going to format it with Damn Small Linux when I get home, because there's little if any data on there that I actually need to recover, but if anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate them (I tried SeaTools from seagate.com and it said it couldn't recognize the filesystem on the drive, but the drive physically checked ok... )