On Sat, 07 Oct 2017 00:19:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

If your older machine has a PCI card slot, you can
get a USB2 card for around $10. Depending on the
whims of the sellers.

You can also get a USB3 card for PCI, but they are
quite expensive. Could be as much as $100 for one of those.
The way those work, is the card has two chips (big deal, right).

One chip converts PCI bus to PCI Express. The PCI bus is
limited to around 100MB/sec of practical transfer rate.
Next, a PCI Express USB3 chip is connected. The card
looks like this.

--- PCI to PCI Express ------- PCI Express to USB3 --- (two or four connectors)

The parts cost for that might be $5 for the first chip
and maybe $5 for the second chip. But because they
don't make very many of the cards, the cards end up
with quite high prices. Really too expensive to be
slapping into old computers (which is the intention
when building cards like that).

The normal high volume cards are like this.

--- PCI Express to USB3 --- (two or four connectors)
for x1 slot

Years ago, I installed a USB2 card in this computer. It lasted several
years, then it just quit working. Two years ago, I bought another one.
That one lasted about one year, then that one quit working. I have just
given up on them since. The USB2 is a lot faster than the 1.1. In fact I
dont see any reason to go to USB3. I think USB2 is fine.

That second PCI card is still in the computer, but it does nothing now.
I have to always boot into Win 2000 to utilize any USB capabilities. I
have a couple 2gb flash drives that Win98 recognizes, thats all. I use
those flash drives to transfer small files.

Half of a miracle occurred. I plugged my bad drive into my XP machine,
using the adaptor that I bought for USB to Harddrive. I ran Recurvia on
it. It took that software nearly 2 hours to go thru that partition. When
it finished, I was very disappointed. Out of about 23gb of data on the
drive, Recurvia found 63 files, out of which only 50 some were
recoverable. All of them were small .JPGs or text files.

That was a waste of time.....

But then I plugged that bad drive back into my Win98 machine, and ALL
the folders came back. Every folder that was on that partition is now
back and I can go from folder to sub folder and see all the files. That
allowed me to go thru everything and determine which folders are on my
old backup, and which ones are newer. How that folder structure
returned, is beyond me, but that was good news. But it's not all good. I
began copying everything that's not backed up, to my C: partition. I can
only save about 60% of the files, and have to copy one file at a time,
while manually making folders. For SMALL files, I can save about 4 out
of 5, but for large files it's less than 50%.

I've spent hours copying files, and have many more hours to go, but I
will save what I can. After that, I have to decide if I want to get a
pro data recovery business, or do something more drastic on my own.

How the folders came back from the dead is beyond me. I can only think
that Recurvia brought them back when it scanned the drive, or else it
has something to do with my removal of all the files on the H: and I:
partitions, after backing them up twice. Oddly enough, XP sees that bad
G: partition as unformatted. Windows 2000 does the same, but Win98 is
seeing it as a valid partition with a lot of data. I just cant copy much
of the data.