Hi all,

I'm so glad I found this place, and for an average user, can't believe I've never switched to linux. Today, it bit me in the rear.

I have a linkstation that died, but I was able to remove the hard drive and hook it directly into my laptop via usb. Basically all of my music is on it, and I want to copy the folder onto another external HD (about 100gb worth), since that drive is PNP with my XP system.

I have no idea how to do this, and will appreciate any and all help.

Thanks,
Lindsay

Connect both drives to the laptop and mount them, copy the files using the GUI interface just like in "Windows" or use the 'cp' and/or 'mv' command(s), see 'man mv' and 'man cp' manpages for the details and options. Hint type the command (for example); man cp

Thanks for the start!

That's even more advanced than what I know, which in linux, is nothing.


The problem is, I can see the files in Explore2FS, but wouldn't even know where to type those commands. The drive is in linux, but I'd not have the foggiest on how to get to any command lines...

Those are fine suggestions when he's running Linux, but if I understand correctly, he's running a Windows Box(NTFS), and needs to get files off a drive that formerly was formatted for a Linux OS.

OP, First, do you know what file system your Linux drive is?(Ext3, ext2, etc..)? There really is no easy way to do this, as you're now finding out, Windows can't see Linux file systems. You can try booting a Live CD, and chmodding, etc, to mount the NTFS drive, and copy the files from your USB drive, to the NTFS drive that way. I don't know how to do that. My understanding is, writing to NTFS drives w/ Linux, can be hit or miss. I don't know, as I don't use Windows anymore.

The limited knowledge I have, I'd end up doing the below, and its certainly more painful than above... If you follow the instructions below, before formatting the drive, just to be safe, make sure while partitioning/formatting, your USB drive is unplugged, so you don't accidentally format it.

Install Linux, to a very small partition on your XP drive. Say 5-10gigs. Then you can use Gparted (or depending on the Live CD, you might be able to do it from it), to Partition the unused space of the XP drive, to Fat32 (which both Linux and XP can/should be able to read). Once that is all done, your drive would look something like this.

Windows partition- probably around 15gigs, if its still a fresh install.
Linux... 5-10gigs.
Fat32... Rest of hard drive(hopefully at least 100gigs)

Once that is done, boot Linux, and plug in the USB drive, copy all of your files to the Fat32 partition. Reboot to Windows. Check and make sure the Fat32 partition you made is recognized, and has your files. If it does, format the USB drive to NTFS, and move the files back to your USB drive. Once the files are safely back on your now NTFS USB drive, you can use the Gparted Live CD, to reclaim the 5-10gig Linux partition, and the 100gig Fat32 partition, back to NTFS, thus making the whole drive for XP. You'll also need to use DOS to run fixmbr to clear Grub off the Master boot record.

Not the easy way by any stretch of the imagination, but it will work.

IGF

What IndyGunFreak said is pretty good, albeit complicated.

If you have access to a second computer, and you can network the 2 computers, this may work:

1. Create and share a folder on the external drive on your Windows computer.
2. Boot the 2nd computer with a LiveCD, and attach the drive containing your files to that computer.
3. Mount a directory on the 2nd computer to the Windows share you created.
4. Copy the files to that directory.
5. Unmount the directory you mounted.

Commands/terms you should research for this issue:
cp (copy)
mount
umount
smbfs/cifs (for use with the mount command)

Seem to me that if you can see the files in Explore2FS, you should be able to drag and drop into windows explorer. Have you tried it?

You can also select the files, right-click and I believe choose "Export files" (or something like that, I can't quite remember).

If the notebook computer has a gigabyte of memory or more, use Knoppix. Then eject the Knoppix disc after it is done copying itself to memory and insert a blank CD or DVD. Knoppix should see the external drive and show it on the desktop. Mount it and use k3b to copy the files from the USB drive to the optical drive. Write to the optical disc at a very slow speed.

The dangerous way is to use Knoppix and use ntfs-mount to mount the NTFS drive as read-write. Then copy the files from the USB drive to the internal drive.

It is best to store files on a FAT32 partition that are going be access by different OS. Linux has a utility to format a very, very big partition as FAT32. Windows 2000/XP can only format a partition that is less than 32 GB, but they can read and write that to a space that is a lot more than that.

I found that XFce4 file manager does a better job searching for smbfs/cifs systems on the the network than other file managers. The command for XFce4 file manager is xffm.

There is a Windows driver that can be installed to read EXT2/3 partitions. Go to http://www.fs-driver.org/.

Its 100gigs worth of files, it would take around 20 DVD's to copy that much data.., not very practical, but it should work.

IGF

Copying 100 GB of data using USB will take a few days. I recommend IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or i.Link) because it is a lot faster. Though ljauss should have backed up valuable data just in case the hard drive fails.

It will take about 13 dual-layer DVD discs to fit 100 GB of data.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <General> since it's a windows-question, and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.