As I was installing Window XP, I had to delete Windows 98 and everything I had with it. You can imagine how much I had since Windows 98 was my last operating system.

I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to retrieve my deleted programs and files from my hard drive?

2. I am trying to reinstall my original programs from the original software disk, am I am not succeeding. I am unable to find "setup" on the disk.

Thank you

If you have already deleted win98 and installed xp your files are almost certainly completely or at least partially overwritten. a program like handyrecovery might be able to find some fragments, but probably nothing usable. The idea is to back up BEFORE you delete.

All hope is not lost. I use this program in the field alot to recover data for my clients. This has been a life saver and has recovered alot of potentially lost data. There is two different versions. One to recover FAT and the other for NTFS. Here is the link to the website Getdataback Hope this helps you out like it has for me and my clients many times.

If you installed XP on the same partition that the 98 install was on then I hope you kept the FAT32 partition. If you reformated the partition as NTFS then I think all hope is lost.

TESTDISK can recover from these situations.

hail hail