I’ve got a laptop with a very sick harddrive. As of yesterday I have been unable to boot Windows 98. Instead I’m getting a ‘Insert system disk’ error.
I booted up with a Win98 Start-Uo disk to a DOS prompt and am able to ‘see’ the C: drive and the files stored on it.
I ran Scandisk but it hangs on the first check (media descriptor check).
I tried Spinrite but after 5 hours it was still stuck on 0.0% done.
I tried HDD Regenerator. Now this program finds bad sectors and tries to repair them. It has son far found 100 bad sectors and repaired 75 of them but I still can’t boot it into Windows.
So my suestion is how can I transfer the data from the harddrive to another machine before I go with a low-level format? I’ve tried plugging the drive into an external drive unit for laptops but XP wasn’t able to detect it. Because I can boot up to DOS then maybe it needs to be a DOS solution but I’m kinda out of answers at the moment 
Seriel connection maybe?