I've been trying to harvest data from various old computers, eventually hoping to have backed up their various small HDs onto a big honking USB external HD that I can then access via my main system. Most of the old computers are of marginal useablilty at this point, but my most recently past "main system" I am thinking of holding on to as it has an internal Zip drive, and I'm thinking of adding (from its predecessor) a 5.25" floppy, so that I will have one thing which will read all my old data.
However, I would very much like to upgrade its OS from W98 to W98se ... and I have obtained an upgrade CD for this purpose. However, I can't get it to do the upgrade as it keeps wanting the key code. I got a utility off the web that supposedly reads the key from the file on the system, but for some reason this is not "taking". Could this possibly be wanting the key code associated with the upgrade disc? I bought this a while back on eBay and there was (not surprisingly) none associated with it.
I've scoured various message boards on this topic and most claim that one key code is pretty much as good as another, but I'm quite surprised that the one that I got via that utility is NOT working.
As this system does have USB connectors, I'm assuming that I can, if need be, just pull stuff off to the external HD, but I was sort of hoping to be able to get this hooked back up to the Internet, and I understand that if I'm going to try to make it talk to our high-speed wireless network, I'm going to need to bump it up to SE.
Anybody have any clues for me why (assuming that this utility is actually giving me the right key code) I can't coerce the system into doing the W98 to W98se upgrade?
I was messing with this all afternoon ... on the good side, having the upgrade CD in there did allow the system to fix itself in terms of recognizing that there was a mouse attached ... over the past several months, those drivers had been corrupted and I was having to try to use keyboard commands for everything!