Can I have help moving data from an old Windows 98 desktop PC to my new Windows 10 PC?

Anonymous
2019-04-29T19:48:42+00:00

I've got this really old Gateway desktop PC that started life as a Windows 95 or earlier (I forget) that I'm wanting to get rid of. It's been sitting unused forever and I disconnected it from my home network years ago when I needed more places to plug stuff into my router since I have 2 Windows XP machines & 2 Windows 10 machines on it.

That old Gateway PC has a 3-1/2" floppy drive that I don't have any discs for and never will, along with a CD drive, a DVD drive and I just discovered that it even has 2 USB ports on the back that I never knew existed.

I've tried endlessly to save the 500mb of Photos and Docs on it onto either a CD or DVD but from all I can tell, they both must be broken or at least maybe the formatting of the discs that I do in a drive on my Windows 10 DELL isn't correct.

Heck, during the formatting process, I even thought that since I'm wanting to use the CD in that old beast Gateway thing, I should set the File System setting from UDF 2.01 (Default) to UDF 1.50, thinking I should use the oldest one it had.

Nothing has worked and I've tried reformatting & Copy/Pasting a bunch of times.

Oddly, it will seem like it is writing to a CD and it shows it stepping thru the Videos, Photos and Docs, but I'll always keep hearing the drive's motor start & stop every 5 or 10 seconds & then if I wait long enough, it does finally show all of the files.

But it's totally weird that if I put another blank CD in that same drive, it shows as if all those same files are on it too.

Weird. That must be some flaw in that old Windows 98 Operating System I guess.

I'd at first tried sticking a USB adapter with a flash card in, thinking that would be super quick. But, it wasn't recognized and something told me that it needed a driver, which isn't possible to get on that PC since it isn't connected anymore to the internet.

So, sorry about all this talk but after spending countless hours, I've concluded that it might be best & easiest to just bring that old PC into my home office & park it next to this Windows 10 DELL Inspirion, hook them together somehow directly with a USB cable instead of thru the router, and then maybe I could just access the old PC's drive and Copy my data off of it.

After all, then I can either burn it onto a tiny flash card or just let it stay on my D: hard drive on this where all of my data is. My C: with Windows & my programs is an SSD to make it super fast.

So, I've rambled on but I do need some basic help in knowing that the old hard drive will be able to be accessed by my new PC if I just connect them with a USB cable or will I need to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor on the old PC too?

I've put this in Windows > Windows 10 > Files, Folders & Storage but if an Admin thinks it should somewhere else, please feel free to move it. Thanks for any help. :-)

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Files, folders, and storage

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Anonymous
2019-05-09T00:37:19+00:00

Did you chose the correct USB drivers for your edition of Win 98?

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php

You stated earlier that the USB driver that you chose (downloaded) is nusb33e.exe. This is for Windows 98SE (Second Edition).

If this is the correct selection for your edition of Win 98 did you follow the installation instructions (found on the download page)?

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win98se-usb-mass-storage-drivers.php

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Anonymous
2019-05-08T03:47:50+00:00

First of all, what drive on the device is the drive letter E: associated with?

Why did you do both at the same time (one at a time is best practice, especially on and old outdated OS that is no longer supported (nor able to be updated past were it was when you stopped using it or updating it when updates were still available)).

At this point try shutting down then unplug the CD drive and the thumb drive then startup the device, then do a restart and give it 10 or fifteen minutes to stabilize, then plugin one of the (either the CD drive or the thumb drive, your choice) peripherals then let me know what happens. What do you then see in My Computer, System properties (Device Manager?) etc..

Let me know.

-Richard

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-05-02T17:47:54+00:00

    Connect it to the router/modem, a viable direct device-to-device connection would require special cables and software.

    If you're not going to do the "cloud" thing then continue on with the driver attempt for using the USB drive on the Win 98 machine.

    Are you able to establish a viable internet connection on the Win 98 device?

    I'm struggling and could really use some help. I tried the "connect it to the router" idea first. I plugged the Ethernet cable that normally connects my ACER All-in-One to the router into the Gateway instead. It instantly has internet and IE opened up the bing.com homepage. Then I put the thumbdrive in and it popped that ADD NEW HARDWARE WIZARD. I selected to only have it find the needed driver at MICROSOFT WINDOWS UPDATE. When I clicked Next, it immediately popped "WINDOWS WAS UNABLE TO LOCATE A DRIVER FOR THIS DEVICE." It had popped that so quickly that I tried it a few times.

    I then thought that I could just use my OneDrive account and upload the files to it, even though that will surely be slower than it would have been to just burn them onto a thumbdrive.

    I had it Bing to find OneDrive and it displayed all kinds of things. So, I clicked on a few of them and it won't take me to anything, saying THIS PAGE CANNOT BE DISPLAYED - REFRESH IT or CHECK YOUR CONNECTION SETTINGS or DETECT NETWORK SETTINGS.

    I tried horsing around with that junk and then I tried just typing in www.onedrive.live.com and it too gave me that same THIS PAGE CANNOT BE DISPLAYED bull.

    Then, since I also have a Google Drive account that I don't use, I thought I'd give that a try. Same thing happened on that.

    It does go to some of the sites in my Favorites but not all of them, not even mapquest.com.

    So, what's up with that? Why will this computer go to some sites but not to others? Are the cloud sites set up to not be used by old Windows 98 machines that use an old version of Internet Explorer? This one is so old that it doesn't even have a version

    in About & it just says Copyright ©1995-2004.

    Maybe this partial lack of connectivity problem is what is causing the ADD NEW HARDWARE WIZARD to fail when I try to have it find the needed driver at MICROSOFT WINDOWS UPDATE?

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-02T18:05:14+00:00

    Could it be that IE is just loading cached stuff for a few sites from my Favorites that do happen to seem to work, along with the Homepage which might also be in cache, and there's no internet connection?

    How could I check that, maybe just by hitting the refresh button after it displays it?

    Although now that I think about it, that Bing search that I did on OneDrive displayed a page full of new links (new I think) but none of them could be clicked so maybe that first page was also from my cache from a long, long time ago? I really don't think I ever had anything to do with OneDrive back when I last used this Gateway computer.

    Heck, OneDrive might not have even been invented yet back then. 😉

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