Hi all,
I'm new around here. I haven't used Windows 98 or DOS in ages, so I apologise in advance if I ask relatively stupid questions.
I'm trying to resurrect my childhood PC. It's an old NEC Direction, rocking a 400MHz Pentium II and 384megs of RAM. It has all its PCI slots filled. IIRC, there are 2 network cards, a video card (although a pretty generic one), a sound card (again, generic, and since I don't have the PC on hand, I can't tell you for sure what it is... more on that later!) and a video capture card.
I dug it out of storage a couple of weeks ago, cleaned it thoroughly (I even had to take the PSU apart. It was so dirty dust bunnies clogged the fan!). But, to my surprise, it posted. The battery was dead of course, but that was to be expected. What wasn't though was the terrible racket coming from one of the hard drives. The Maxtor 10.8GB IDE HD had bitten the dust. Unfortunately, that was the C: drive...
I had a look around and found backup CDs from 2002 labeled 1 through 7. I inserted them one by one into the only modern PC I have at my disposal (It runs Vista and it's crap, but still, could be worse). All of them are fine except one. Unfortunately CD #6 has been erased (It's the only CD-RW in the bunch...). The backups were made using 98's built in backup program, so we have to deal with .qic files...
Apparently I need Windows to run this software so I'm going to do that ASAP.
Now that you have a general idea of what's going on, I have a couple of questions:
#1: Is it possible to partially restore my documents using only 6 out of the 7 CDs? Or do I really need all 7 to do anything? That would suck...
#2: Was it possible to backup everything on the drive (including the windows folder, drivers etc...) with this piece of software? I'm mainly concerned about the system itself, as I found backups of the documents elsewhere.
#3: If I have to stick with a clean install of Windows, then how do I put back all the personal documents from the 3 users?
#4: What would you recommend to buy as a replacement? Hard drive? SSD? I'm open to all suggestions as long as it has a PATA connector. I don't need that much storage, 20GB tops!
THANKS!