Later today (hopefully) I am taking delivery of a new computer system - lucky me eh
After being talked into it by a friend who is upgrading his. What can I say, I'm easily lead
However, I have a slight problem. The explanation for this is quite lengthy, so you may wish to consider a "bathroom break" and stocking up on "refreshments" before you start reading :P
A few months ago after a system failure I tried to install WinXP Pro upon my system, just to see whether it would work or not:
Intel 1.7 (478)
Asrock P4V88 motherboard
6600GT graphics card
1 bootdrive
Win98se
256mb ram
dvdrw
cdrw
floppy
1 caddy drive
like this into which a further 5 drives slot in and out. Data collected through the years of pc use etc.
Things didn't quite go according to plan after installing XP Pro. I found that I could no longer swap the harddrives in the caddy. Instead, when I booted XP it refused to "see" the drives no matter what I tried. Infact the only drives that were recognised by XP were those that were installed at the time XP was installed on the system. None of the other drives were seen at all. Only in the bios, but never in WinXP Pro.
Eventually after much frustration and numerous friends attempting what they "knew was the solution", I fdisked and reformatted the bootdrive and reinstalled Win98se. Tried swapping the various caddy drives and found everything worked as expected - the drives were recognised along with all folders etc.
Of course, a few weeks later I need to access some files and insert one of the caddy drives only to find that though the Folder is there, the .rar files containing the required files were now split into folders named with strange file names ie: "SFI%$^J:LK~1", "SFI%$^J:LK~2" etc. I assume that this is as a result of the previous failed install of WinXP Pro owing to the fact there is a ghosted folder visible under Win98se called "System Volume Information" that appeared on each drive that I tried to get XP Pro to recognise. I promptly virus scanned and everything is clean.
Needless to say, I would like to access this data once again.
The problem is, I would like to retrieve my data from those old harddrives as well as any data on my soon to be "old bootdrive". In short; How can I do this?
To complicate things further, I have a laptop with WinXP Home installed. I have a router Linksys WRT54G into which the main system is hardwired, the laptop connects wirelessly. No matter what I try, I have been unable to connect or share files from 98se to the laptop XP Home or vice versa. So am discounting using this method to transfer the files to the new system via the laptop. I have already tried to sync the laptop to the desktop and retrieve my outlook express email, but obviously the two don't see each other and so the "files settings and transfer wizzard" fails. I only mention this, as I mentioned having a laptop in these same forums and thought it would save time if anyone saw that post and thought that this was a solution. As I can assure them, it isn't
Obviously, I am in a bit of a pickle and was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how I can do the following:
1) Migrate the data from my old system drive (IDE) to the new system (SATA), specifically the various program settings and email.
2) Access my old data on my old harddrives all of which use IDE. Upon my "new" system.
Can anyone help? Offer any suggestions on how I can achieve this?
Thanks.
Join CF
You are here: 
Need some advice
Then installing various network protocols, then "tweaking" various settings, then updating the firmware on the router. Then sending me a replacement, after which I had to repeat the above all over again. The result from this is, that they don't "see" each other. But when they do, they can't communicate with each other. I tell you it's worse than a marriage. I've a bald spot from all of this 
