GoBack from whence you came

GoBack from whence you came

I was staying with my inlaws at the weekend, and they’ve bought a new PC. I offered to transfer all their files from their seven year old Windows 98 PC over to their new one for them.

However, this was fraught with complications.

My usual method of doing this would be with a USB drive of some kind. Unfortunately, we’d called in at the inlaws on the way back from our holiday in Bournemouth, so I didn’t have any with me. I did have a MicroSD card and reader though, but no Windows 98 drivers. And no internet access, as they’ve cancelled their dialup and are awaiting broadband. But I did have access via my phone, but no way of getting the drivers to the PC.

But I could transfer files to the new Vista PC. Except then there was no way of getting files from there to the Windows 98 machine. The Win98 PC had a floppy drive, but the Vista one did not. Besides, the driver was too big for a floppy. The Vista PC did have a DVD writer, but only blank DVDs (not CDs) were available, and the Win98 machine had only a CD reader.

Networking the two machines was out of the question, as the Win98 machine had no network card. No firewire ports either.

So I took the Win98 machine apart, and put its hard drive in as a slave in the Vista PC. After realising the Vista machine had somehow decided to give boot priority to the older driver, I finally got Vista running, and it installed drivers for the old drive. But nothing new appeared in My Computer. Ominous.

Having a look at Disk Manager, the drive was there, in all it’s 10GB glory. Two partitions, one just 16MB at the end of the drive, and the main 9.5GB-ish one, with no drive letter. And no ability to give it one. In fact, the only option open to me was to delete it. Stupid Vista. Or so I thought.

In the end, I said I’d take the drive into work where I have better tools and equipment, and post it back with some CDs of the data.

I have a USB-to-IDE adapter, which I plugged it into, and then connected that to my XP machine. Same result as in Vista – it sees it, but can’t mount it.

I tried Drive Image. It’s not a valid partition. I tried a disk repair – no faults found. I booted up with gparted, and it couldn’t see any mountable partitions. I plugged it into my Mac – it said it couldn’t mount it. I was very confused.

Then I remembered something. The Windows 98 machine was made by Evesham, who, at the time, installed GoBack on their PCs. If you don’t know what it is, then think of it as a third party System Restore for pre-XP machines. Every time you reboot, GoBack makes a log of system changes and lets you – get this – “Go Back” to a previous system state. Amazing! Of course, this was also the reason why I couldn’t mount the drive. You see, GoBack alters the Master Boot Record of the drive, I assume to allow GoBack to be run before and “behind” Windows without Windows realising. The side-effect of this is that the partitions are seen as invalid.

Thankfully, I found out how to disable GoBack. Unfortunately, this required booting the from the drive, and I only had the drive – not the full system. To make things even worse, most of the machines I have here wouldn’t even pass the POST with the old drive as the boot drive. I say most, as I found an eight year old PC which is a similar spec to the machine the drive came from.

So, in the drive goes. Power up – and hold Ctrl-Alt and hammer G while booting and… success! The options came up to disable GoBack, so I did, removed the drive, plugged it back into my XP machine via USB, and retrieved everything. Hurrah!

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