Security for - wait for it .........- Windows 98

Hi, I joined up 12-13-2013 just to reply to this old thread! To get data off of a W9x machine throw the boot floppy in and find what you need and figure out how big it is and can you compress (zip) it smaller? Then, will it fit on a reasonable number of 3.5" floppies? If no, shut it off and plug in the smallest flash drive the stuff will fit on, preferably 2ggigs or smaller. cold boot off your floppy and check your BIOS screen to try and enable USB, USB BOOT, anything that might help. I BET when it boots off boot floppy and you run FDISK/status it will show the Mem. stick as "Disk 1" and your HDD as "Disk 2". Then actually run FDISK and SELECT THE RIGHT "DISK" and create a DOS partition (you won't be able to make it "active", don't try). Then shut it off and reboot and then format "Disk 1"... give it a memorable Volume Label.
All you have to do then is , under W98, (hope you got a 98 install CD), look on CD for "Tools" and under that "MTsutils" and under that "OldMSDOS" and
put the "XCOPY" command on the floppy. Then floppy boot and use DOS's XCOPY to put what you need on the USB stick. WHEWW! YOU'RE DONE!!!

 

DOS doesn't read USB devices in its default form regardless of BIOS settings. USB drives didn't exist when DOS was commonly used. In order for a boot floppy/CD to be able to read/access USB devices, it will need to have its own USB driver and the corresponding entries in config.sys and autoexec.bat. There are several available, some of which work very well. The DOS boot CD I've assembled has no trouble with an 80GB external hard drive or any of the flash drives I've tried. Depending on the content to be recovered, a driver that enables DOS to handle long file names might also be necessary.

The hardest part of assembling such a boot floppy/CD is getting the configuration files right. Several of the drivers have to be loaded in a specific order as one depends on a function provided by another that's loaded before it. It's difficult to get the boot portion of the floppy/CD right.

When built right, a DOS boot CD/floppy is far more useful than most realize, especially with utilities like NTFS for DOS available. The professional version, now abandonware, could read and write to NTFS. NDN is one of the best DOS shells available. There are registry tools that work from DOS. There is a command line version of 7zip that works well with DOS but it also requires that the bootdisk has drivers that are not present on the standard boot floppy. I think it's a DPMI driver but am not sure at the moment. It's been a while. I have packed and archived entire operating systems from DOS using the this version of 7zip. The process was very slow but the resulting archive was half the size of an Acronis backup of the same partition. AFAIC, this DOS boot CD is one of the most useful tools I've used when cleaning infected systems. Just building one is its own education, and a lesson in patience.

 

Haven't read the whole thread but may be VBA32 haven't been mentioned. This antivirus will work on Windows 98.
http://www.anti-virus.by/en/personal.shtml