98 to XP

When you say he loaded backups onto his system, do you mean he had made a backup of his W98 system and then restored it after XP had been installed?

If so, he has corrupted his XP system files.

Even if he only attempted to restore program and registry files, that would create some serious file conflicts.

The "fix" is to format the hard drive and start over again.

There are 3 ways to migrate your programs and settings from Windows 98 to XP:

Use the upgrade version of XP and install it on a running W98 system.

Build up a new system. Network the 2 systems together. Then use the files and settings transfer wizard.

Use migration software such as PC Relocator.

Chas

Hi

In my experience different versions of the Windows built-in backup utility are not backward compatible.

When you say backups do mean the QIC files created by the Win98 MS-Backup utility? If so, then the backups can probably be restored using another Windows 98 machine. One option may be to install a FAT32 slave drive into a Win98 computer, restore the backups to the slave drive, then connect it the new WinXP machine, again as a slave, and copy the data to the C: drive??

Good luck

You can't, and I will tell you why. Basically all files are stored on your hard drivers as blocks of memory. If something fails horribly, those files can cross over into each other making the files and possibly the names appear but all you get when attempting to launch the files is code.

I have seen this time and again when someone tries to recover or restore a formatted drive or a partition recovery tool was used. They do work some of the time but one bad sector or something on the disk that is unrecoverable can/will throw all the other files pieces and part together, hence making all files jumbled and unreadable.

My guess would be that something like the above was attempted and for me so far there is no way to fix it (That I know of)

I know thats not what you wanted to hear, but this does happen.

I wish you the best in your recovery!

Good Luck.