Thanks for the info about EXTRACT. It'll be handy in the future. 🙂
It turns out what ever bit this machine, it was shot at and missed, but sh8 at and hit. It was totally FUBAR beyond any hope of rescue. I immediately posted my question based on what I first saw when it booted and dumped to the DOS prompt. I got the subtle hint about how bad it was when I booted from my own Win 98 DOS disk (NOT the standard recovery disk) and found the entire Windows directory was gone, along with others. :Q
It's an old Toshiba lappy with not enough resourses to run anything newer than 95. My friend's first objective was to retrieve info from a particular file so I ran SCANDISK, which restored as much as possible, including file and directory names that include happy faces and eighth note characters. Then I gave sent him home with a bootable floppy with three old DOS utilities, TS (Text Search) and FF (File Find) from Norton 6 for DOS, and that great old shareware, LIST.COM. TS will search the whole drive for files with any ASCII text string he hopes to find. FF will find those files anywhere on the drive and take him to the directory without having to enter an impossible directory or file name, and LIST.COM will allow him to find the text string in those files, scroll forward and back through them, and copy specific blocks of usable text from them to another file small enough to copy to a floppy for further processing.
That's hours more work than I have time to give, but if he needs the info, he now has some tools that will allow him to recover whatever is left after the original catastrophy. After that, it's up to him whether he wants to reformat that old lappy and try to use it. It doesn't have enough resources to run anything more than Win 95. Personally, I think it's worth its weight in doorstops, but that's up to him.
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
