Need to copy old hard drive to a flash drive (memory stick), or to what-ever.
 

I have an old win98 hard drive that I need to salvage data from. It would no longer boot, as it is missing a lot of Windows stuff.
It still is in the original box, but BIOS doesn't recognize a flash drive.
Can I just take it out and then what?
Thanks, Hearthstone.

Try booting off a live cd and see if the flash drive is detected, if it is then just 'dd' the contents to the flash drive.

Either go for a live-CD, or you take out the disk and connect it to a different computer (keep in mind that the older disk most likely will be an IDE disk, while some newer computers don't have IDE connectors anymore.
If you can connect it to a different machine the disk should automatically show up in your file-manager, so that you can access it and copy the wanted data from it to another storage device.

I wouldn't start with taking it out just yet. A few minimal type live cd's ought to be OK to see if you can easily cut and past the data. As above a dd will save the entire image of either the disk or partitions you select. An entire disk of dd would be a raw image that could be mounted in a round about way.



Bios doesn't do anything after the OS has booted for the most part. Bios only stops you from booting to a usb flash drive and that can be fixed too.