Opening Old Compressed Files

[BigWords]

There are a bunch of 3.5 floppies which I had been meaning to dust off and check for some time, but on placing them in the disk drive I found that they had been compressed with Windows 98. I know I should have checked before throwing out the old computer, so now I need to know the quickest way of getting to the info stored on them. There's probably 300k of my writing on them, so compressing the files saved a bit of space at the time - not so helpful now.

I have Win XP, Vista and a couple of varieties of Linux to choose from, so any techniques that apply to those systems are welcome. I no longer have Win 98 available (yeah, I know I should have kept my disks), so I can't follow the advice box which pops up when I try to extract them to anything else.

[Medievalist]

What are they compressed with? What is the .appendix?

Consider that they may be a backup set, in which case you may not be able to reconstruct them without whatever was used as the backup program (that is, Norton Backup or Retrospect or somethin).

[BigWords]

I loaded the files onto the disks then compressed them with the Windows compression software that 98 had bundled with it. From memory, I think I just left-clicked on the drive and clicked the 'Compress Disk' choice - this was over a decade ago, so my memory may be faulty on that regard. I'll boot up the other laptop and check the appendix.

[BigWords]

I can't even see the files. There is, however, a neat READTHIS.txt:

This disk was compressed using DriveSpace 3, which requires Windows 98.

To use this disk, you must first mount it:

It then explains I what I need to do (if I had access to Win98, that is), which isn't helpful in the slightest. I'm almost certain that the compression was from the Advanced menu after left-clicking the drive.

[Pesimisticus]

Ugh. I hate proprietary compression software for this very reason.

Unfortunately, there is no way to uncompress the file unless you're running 98. You can find it online if you're so inclined, though that isn't particularly legal, so I'm not recommending it.

There are inexpensive copies on eBay and Amazon.

If you only have the one computer without any spare hard drives to install 98, then you should install it on a USB flash drive. Before doing that, make sure your computer/laptop can boot from USB by looking at the boot sequence in BIOS. If it lists USB, then you're good.

Take the hard drive out of your computer just to be safe, put the flash drive in a USB slot, put the CD in, and install it to the flash drive just like you would a hard drive (a 4GB flash drive should be adequate).

When finished, reboot the system and enter BIOS. Change the boot order to boot from USB first. It should boot from the flash drive no problem.

From that point on, try to uncompress the CD. If I remember correctly, Win 98 doesn't come with Drvspace 3 installed by default, so you may have to go into Control Panel and 'activate' the software.

[BigWords]

Yeah, I figured that getting 98 would be the ONLY way to get at my stuff. It figures... All this time to work out what to do with my old lists, guides and databases, and I can't access them bloody things any more.

I've been at this - on and off - for the past week, and should have figured that the dreaded OS would be looming on my horizon. Did I fail to mention how much I hated using 98?

[Medievalist]

Are you sure that there isn't a later version of Drive Space, or a converter?

I'd do some more Googling. This is not likely to be unique-to-you problem, at all.

[BigWords]

I've been through the Google-woes. There are dozens of threads about this very thing. The majority of them are from five or six years ago (roughly the time every normal person would have decided to check their old files) and they all seem to agree that 98 is the only way to go. With the passage of so much time I half-expected there to be an emulation-type solution available (the same way I can, through digital jiggery-pokery, play DOS games on shiny, shiny Vista), but nobody seems to have stepped up to the plate with a one-program-does-it-all solution.

[petec]

The ONLY way you can access the files is with Win95/98 (Fat32) drivespace. If you can get hold of a win 98 installation disc, you can use a virtual machine (such as vmware or virtualbox ) and load 98 without affecting your XP installation.

[Matera the Mad]

Good grief.

Sorry, but I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Crap. I have Win98 disks all over the place. Nobody cares about it much any more, least of all Microslut -- it's considered a freebie OS nowadays.

[CaoPaux]

Your local computer repair shop will likely have old machines laying around for just such purposes. A data-recovery service certainly would. Otherwise, track down a computer club and apply pizza until desired result achieved.