I recently yanked hard drives from two very old PCs--one Dell about 10 years old, and an HP about 5 years old--that had been rendered unbootable for whatever reason and were now being recycled. I was able to recover complete drive images to my OS X system from both. My client is not computer-literate, but would like me to see if I can recover any personal data from these systems. Problem is, my expertise is with Macs, not PCs (though I am slowly learning).
My question is, on OS X 10.7 (command-line or otherwise), what is the best approach to sifting through the data on these two drive images? I believe the one was a Win98 system, the other WinXP.
At present, I am planning on using a combination of the find command in Terminal and Disk Inventory X to strip out all of the generic Windows cruft (like anything ending in .exe or .dll) and see if I can locate the user data directories where most of this stuff will be located.
I'm hoping someone with more knowledge of old PC filesystems and/or UNIX file hierarchy traversal might have better ideas!
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