"Trent©" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:12:36 -0500, "Zip" wrote:

Put a third clean 200+MB hard drive in with a fat 16 partition.

Is there any way to create a FAT 16 partition on the XP NTFS hard drive
without a re-format? A re-format is really not an option at this time.

You'll need a 3rd party program that can work with
partitions...Partition Manager, Partition Magic, etc. You'll need to
resize the current partition...making it smaller so that you have room
for the new partition. Then create the new FAT 16 partition...making
sure you keep it under 2 gig.

Hmmm.. N9 pointed out that DOS 6.22 would only recognize the FAT 16
partition if it were in the first 8 GB of the NTFS disk. I'd have to clear
up a whole lot of space for that to happen. His/her recommendation was a
third drive, other than the NTFS and Maxtor drives, to create the FAT 16
partition.

snip useful info

Copy the data off the compressed second drive, to the non compressed
third
drive.
Then reboot win xp and get access to the non compressed files.

If a FAT 16 partition cannot be created without a reformat, would there be
a
devious way to dump the drive-spaced data to the CD burner, or a USB jump
drive, or something?

Yes...there is a way...too lengthy to explain in detail. It amounts
to loading the drivers for those drives...so that you can see them.

From what I've read on deja so far, it seems that many current chipsets and
BIOSes allow automatic USB drive recognition in DOS without drivers. This
seems the most straightforward approach at this point, and would save me
from having to buy a new hard drive just to restore this old one. I'd feel
much better about shelling out $50 for a 512MB USB drive to solve this
problem than $50 for another hard drive. I was going to upgrade from my 32
MB one anyway (bleh!).

I don't know what type of support win xp has for mounting compressed
drive
volumes.
The other people here should be able tell you that info.

You'd think think that someone would have developed a little Windows GUI
by
now that would allow people access to their DOS-compressed drives in the
modern Windows world.

AFAIK, you are the first person I've seen in many a moon that's had a
compressed volume problem! lol Who would pay for such a GUI !! LOL

Honestly, if it were under $100, and had a pretty decent chance of success,
I might. =|