PANTERA
July 20th, 2003, 05:19 AM
Hey There can someone please help me I have an old laptop with WIN95 and looks that the HDD is about to "die" I can't boot into WIN so I runned scandisk from DOS and I got this msg. "invalid long file name enty, unable to fix it run scandisk for windows. This laptop doesn't have a cd. rom(I have WIN95 on CD) so how can I run scandisk for win. ...I would like to be able to boot into windows and copy some of the programs then reformat the HDD.. any ideas.Thank you.
Alfons
July 21st, 2003, 01:37 AM
The simplest approach for me would be to take the drive out of the laptop, attach a 2.5inch to 3.5inch converter, put it into a "regular" computer, copy what you want and then configure the 2.5 inch HD. You can even copy all the W95 installation files onto the newly formatted laptop HD and then you won't have a problem trying to install it without a CD drive.
Post if you need more detail on any point(s).
PANTERA
July 22nd, 2003, 03:06 AM
The simplest approach for me would be to take the drive out of the laptop, attach a 2.5inch to 3.5inch converter, put it into a "regular" computer, copy what you want and then configure the 2.5 inch HD. You can even copy all the W95 installation files onto the newly formatted laptop HD and then you won't have a problem trying to install it without a CD drive.
Post if you need more detail on any point(s).
ok but the laptop's drive is only a 540mb would it be recognized by my computer I'm runing WIN98 on my desktop computer.also if I copy the files with DOS will they work when I reinstalled them on the laptop??sorry if I sound stupid but I'm a "newbie" on this.
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Thank you for the help.
Alfons
July 22nd, 2003, 10:07 PM
Drive Recognition: If the drive's working, it will be recognized by a newer computer capable of using larger and newer drives. You should check the BIOS settings to make sure that the appropriate position (Primary Slave, Secondary Master, or Secondary Slave) is enabled for AUTO detection.
File Copy: The old drive will have been partitioned in FAT16 and your W98 machine will most likely have it's Operating System Drive partitioned in FAT32, so looking from FAT 32 to FAT 16, then yes you will see everything on the small disk, and you can copy anything-to-everything from the small disk to the large one and back again as long as you don't change any file names. DOS 6.X, Windows 3.X, and earlier W95 didn't understand Long File Names (LFN), so if you want to use the files with any of those OSs, then you want to keep the file names to the 8.3 rule - eight letters for the name, dot as a separator, and 3 letters for the file extension. If you're going to use a LFN capable OS, then it doesn't matter, but you have very limited room to do this with only 540 Mb.
To reconfigure the old drive, any FDISK will do that, you can even do that while it's connected to your W98 machine.
Make sure that you use a 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter to attach the small drive - it doesn't use 12 volts like your non-laptop drives, only 5 volts for both the electronics and the motor, and the adapter provides the proper connectivity for the data cable and the power cable..