My PC has Windows 98 and two hard drives (one of which is for backups). After being infected by a virus, the Registry has become corrupted and I am unable to access Windows. To try to save data on the main drive I copied files and directories (using DOS) over to the backup drive. The main drive was then reformatted and the operating system was reinstalled. The problem I now have is accessing the files I backed up, which do not appear as folders in Windows but as files with a Windows icon. These icons do not open when double-clicked. How can I access this important information?
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Without being able to inspect these files for ourselves, it isn't possible to give you any definite advice. One possibility is that you have failed to install, on to your freshly-installed copy of Windows, the application you usually use to open these files. But if, as you appear to be saying, the files you cannot open are supposedly folders, it would appear that something went wrong when you were copying them to the backup drive using DOS.
It is also possible that the files are directories which, for some reason, don't have the directory attribute. This needs to be fixed using a disk utility like Norton DiskEdit - there's no way to do it using standard Windows tools.
We can only suggest seeing whether you can access these backed-up folders from DOS. If you can, try copying the saved files back to the main hard drive using DOS commands. The lesson for the future is that you should always check you can read your backup files before deleting the originals. See also tip Can't access CD drive after virus.
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Introduction | Windows