Request for assistance, somewhat off topic

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Mark Glassberg wrote:
> I got a Win98 (not 2d Ed) laptop from my brother.  Before installing linux,
> I decided to try to save what was on it--just in case.  I booted a floppy
> based rescue system, mounted hda1 and made a tar file of it (to another
> partition).  Before going ahead, I decided to check to make sure the tar
> file can restore the original.
> 
> I almost, but not quite, succeeded.  The Win98 was on a fat16 partition.
> The restored filesystem has 8-character dos-type filenames.  I did not
> make a recursive list of the original file names.
> 
> Does Win98 store those names anywhere on the filesystem?  If so, can I
> recover them?  If so, how?

The long file names are stored in additional directory entries that are hidden from normal view. If you were to look at a Windows 98 partition with DOS and do a directory listing that includes hidden files, you would see a bunch of very weird looking entries.

The problem is that your rescue disk probably mounted the Windows 98 partition as FAT rather than VFAT, so the long file names weren't visible. If you had made the tar file with the partition mounted as VFAT, it would have stored the long names instead of the short ones. Of course, your rescue disk may not include that mount type; in that case, you'll have to use another method, or at least another rescue disk.

Unless you have already reformatted the laptop, the long names should still be intact there.