[SlickRCBD]

A couple weeks ago I backed up my Win98SE computer's hard drive to a virtual
machine virutal disk drive in preparation to replace the dying drive.
When I tried to copy everything back, the
dates on the various folders were not preserved no matter what I did.
Nor were the file dates preserved.

Now that Windows is up and running after swapping hard drives, I'm
trying to restore some files where dates were significant. It seems
when I copy a file by itself or in groups of FILES, the dates are
preserved, but if I include a folder the date modified gets set to the
current date. How do I copy the folders so the modification dates are
preserved? I tried to recall how to use the ms-dos style restore
command, but restore /? yielded "bad command or filename" indicating
it wasn't available, and Microsoft Backup only seems to work with
their own backup files.

The files I want are stored on a virtual hard drive, and I can share
them with either a virtual windows 98SE (cloned from the real computer
I'm trying to restore them to, I just boot the backup partition) or a
Virtual Windows XP Professional computer.
Even if I could access them from the host Vista 64 OS, trying to
access a Vista share will make a Windows 98SE computer crash, either
virtual or real.

So, how do I copy a bunch of folders back to the real computer and keep the original modification dates? I don't recall ever having this problem before, but it's possible I never noticed as the folder dates were rarely important compared to the file dates.

[c0lin]

I don't know if this is true for Win98 but on XP if you zip all the files, move it to the new computer, then extract them they will retain there creation, modified, and last accessed dates. Also I don't recall if Win98 has WinZip built in. Also I don't know if Win98 WinZip will retain the date information you need. However I tested to see if it would retain that data between computers (XP to XP) and it did. This method doesn't work with 7-Zip or WinRAR.

If zipping in 98 doesn't retain the data then simply connect that drive to an XP machine (or run it virtually) and see if the date data is visible from when looking at it from XP. Then just use XP to zip the files.

This doesn't work for you then post back here and we'll try to figure out another solution.