This is a dual boot system, Win98 and Linux Slackware 9.1
Win98 partition is vfat32 and Linux's is ext3.
Win partition is mounted through fstab at startup in /mnt/D: with options :
/dev/hda5 /mnt/D: vfat -o codepage=1251 -o iocharset=cp1251 1 0

There are some directories and files on that partition which have cyrillic names, created under windows98 and in Linux their names are unreadable , at least in their cyrillic part .

This is all new to me and I can't make out what else could possibly be done to get readable characters.

I have enabled Xft in rc.local and installed some windows fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/fromttf. And also have put the /path/to/fonts in /etc/X11/fs/config.
Then replaced the FontPath "....." in /etc/X11/XF86Config with FontPath "unix/:7100"

Then I tried to mount win98 partition with different options like :
-o codepage=855 -o iocharset=ibm855
-o codepage=866 -o iocharset=ibm866
-o codepage=8859-5 -o iocharset=iso8859-5

but unfortunately to no effect!
Any suggestions?

I think that the iocharset should match the charset of your terminal. Try using this fstab entry, if you are using the utf-8 in linux.

Here is a web page on mounting vfat partitions. The author gave an example mounting a vfat partition using a Japanese codepage.

http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/mounting-vfat.html

I tried this but it still didn't work.
Cyrillic characters that were visible in Win98 for filenames and dir names are now in Linux like hieroglyphs.
But there's more to it. Some text files contained cyrillic text encoded in cp1251 - the win cyrillic code page.
When i open them in the default viewer in KDE's Conqueror - KWrite they produce exactly the same gibberish glyphs as the cyrillic filenames produce in Conqueror. When I change the encoding of KWrite to windows-1251
however the text inside the file becomes readable. So KWrite can find a suitable font to display cyrillic cp1251
text but Conqueror as well as KConsole can't...
Why is that ? Any suggestions?
Does this mean that seeing cyrillic filenames in Win98 partition is not only a mount issue but involves some tweaking of fonts as well?
In what way it can be done ?

By the way this entry in the fstab seems most appropriate:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/D: vfat auto,user,iocharset=cp1251,codepage=1251 1 0

It produces the same glyths for the corresponding filenames as well as for the text inside the file.
If I use iocharset=utf8 there is no match between the glyphs for the identical characters when they are in the filename and when they are in the file itself.