Back in 1999, I bought a PC from (now defunct) TIME COMPUTERS, based on adverts I saw on TV which featured my all time favourite Sci-Fi actor; Leonard Nimoy - Star Trek's Mr Spock. The advert promised an up to date PC with a mega Bundle of CD-ROMS including encyclopaedias. The PC was good, a 486 processor and 256MB RAM which I duly upgraded when I could. One extra that was good back then was a SuperDisk LS-120 drive. This was a backup device which could read and write standard 3.5" floppy disks but also the SuperDisk 120MB drives - yes 120MB on a floppy disk. As CD-ROM writing drives were very expensive back then £100s, the LS-120 was put to good use and I backed up all my important files. 

As life moved on, technology got better and cheaper, the LS-120 got used less and less and as the MoBo was replaced with a newer faster one and then another, whose BIOS didn't support the LS-120, it eventually got consigned to the loft along with the disks.

Move on 20 years and I was asked by Mrs L if I had some old photos I'd taken with my first digital camera. I had of course copied the files onto the newer computers as the years moved on but some of these photos she remembered were not there. Could they still be on those old SuperDisks? How to recover them? What backup program had I used, there had been so many over the years.

So I dug out the drive from the loft, found the last MoBo whose BIOS supported the LS-120 and fired up a relatively new HDD with Windows 7 installed. Yes, there were the files on at least one of the disks that was still readable, many were not. But the file extension for the backup was .qic. What was this? It turns out, this was the file format used by MS BACKUP from Windows 95, 98 and ME. It was dropped after 98 as the licence for the software, developed by Seagate, had not been renewed. I therefore had to find a HDD with Windows 98 on it, but I could not find one. I decided to reinstall Windows 98 on another old 60GB drive and see if I could recover the files that way. As you'll see in the video, I installed Windows 98 and then had to install the Second Edition upgrade in order to get MS BACKUP working. I recovered a lot of the files Mrs L was looking for but some were lost as the disks were unreadable, time had taken it's toll on them.

I hope you enjoy the video as it show (albeit speeded up) the Windows 98 installation process which some people may never have seen, it's an eye opener compared to todays installers.

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