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I'm currently going through hard drives of my previous computers (Win 98 through Win 7). The goal is to identify personal files, communication, or programs to keep before I throw away the drives. Unfortunately, I wasn't very organized with files on my early computers.

I'm going through the old file systems folder-by-folders. Files to keep are usually in the Desktop folder, the AppData folder, the Program Files folder etc.

My question: Is there any sub folder of the Windows folder I should be looking at? Or is it all generic Windows drivers and I can ignore the Windows folder entirely?

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  • Technically it depends on the software and what you class as personal files really
    – Dave
    Jan 7, 2014 at 9:59

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Windows 9x kept user profiles in subdirectories of the Profiles directory in the Windows installation directory. So that is definitely one place you do want to look in.

My Documents would be a given, but I think you already have that covered. As I recall it'll be either under a profile directory or directly in the root of the system drive.

Also, .ini files were sometimes stored in the Windows installation directory. Most of these should be system-global, of little relevance today, and .ini files were generally deprecated with the advent of Windows 95 in favor of using the registry, but it's still something you might want to look out for.

You should, however, be able to safely ignore the System directory and anything under it. (I don't think Windows 9x ever had System32; that was a Windows NT construct.) There are a few exceptions, like perhaps \windows\system\hosts (as I believe was the name of the equivalent to \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts today) but if you haven't needed it for several years, chances are it's out of date anyway.

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