need help with drivespace on an older computer

[andrewagibson]

Ok heres the thing, I'm trying to backup stuff on a friends laptop that wont boot up to windows anymore, and so I'm trying to copy all the files to cd since i got the hdd hooked up to my computer, well I look at the hard drive and tehres hardly anything on it, a folder for communicator and real and thats about it, but the info says the hard drive has 900 some megs used on it, and theres one file on the root called drivespace.000 thats 900 megs, and theres a file called drivespace.bin that i assume is associated with it. Am I right in assuming that in these files are the compressed contents of the hard drive? What exactly is drivespace and how does it work, how can I extract the contents of that file? Any help greatly appreciated thanks

 

[bacillus]

On Windows 9x/ME
Programs -> Accesories -> System Tools -> Drivespace

Choose the drive with the dblspace.000 file on it, go to Advanced on the Menu
and choose "Mount". That should give you access to the compressed drive that your
friend saved all his data on.

 

[andrewagibson]

I'm on XP...any tips? any program I can download to access it?

 

[KF]

Originally posted by: andrewagibson
I'm on XP...any tips? any program I can download to access it?

In case you don't get a better answer:

I don't know enough about XP. There may be some possibilty that XP will do something like convert drivespace if you attempt to install XP and it finds a compressed drive. Then again, maybe not.

But there is a device driver for DOS that will access drivespaced drives. When I used to use drivespace, the DOS boot disk that Windows created always had a drivespace driver on it. Getting hold of such a DOS floppy may be easier than installing Win9x in order to access drivespace. The person you are helping could have such a boot disk. The floppy that you can boot from to first install W9x is liable to be able to access drivespace, and it is likely you can find the file to create this boot disk somewhere on the Microsoft site.