Uprade from 98 to 2K failed need help.

[AtomsTech]

I have a computer that failed during the 2k upgrade. There error was illegal operation performed by wind32.exe. Then the system locked up. On reboot the system boots to a blank screen. If I boot to the win 2k disk I can run recovery on the current installation or install a parallel installation (winnt2) but can not get the system to boot to the os.

I've been reading and it sounds like an OS/hardware conflict. I can go back to 98 no problem but the issue now is that some important data was missed during the backup and now I need it off the machine. Using the 2k recovery console I can see it so I know it is still there but I can not copy it to removable media. The win 98 disk can not see a valid partition since the drive was converted to NTFS during the upgrade so it wants to do a reformat. Is there anyway to convert the drive back to FAT with out losing the data or any other way to recover the data in its current state?

Thanks.

Thanks.

 

[ImpetusEra]

I think it would be best to pull the HD and put it in a machine running 2k and pull what you want off it then do a clean install.

 

[AtomsTech]

Thanks for your response. I was planning on trying that today.