linux hard drive on windows

vertigo88x · 12-16-2007, 12:15 AM

ok so, i had a laptop running fedora 7, that laptop's screen went bad, so i sold it for parts, but i kept the hard drive. i bought an enclousure for it. my plan was to use it as an external drive to a new computer i was going to build myself, that has been put off for some time, but i need my data. so on another computer running XP SP2 i want to use these files, windows recognizes the disk, i downloaded from http://www.fs-driver.org/ in order to read my disk, but when i do, it shows the size as 101 MB and when i surf into it it only shows a grub folder and a lost+found folder. and some other files.

ok, some new light into the issue.

when i ran the software again it shows this http://i11.tinypic.com/86g3ng5.jpg

it's not giving me an option to assign a letter to the part of the drive that i want.

jschiwal · 12-16-2007, 12:28 AM

Your driver adds support for ext2 in windows. The second partition is a logical volume (LVM). You could run a live linux distro and copy the files you need.

vertigo88x · 12-16-2007, 12:43 AM

ok i am right now on ubuntu live cd, because i had the same idea. when i plug in the external drive, it shows it as a USB drive but again only shows grub and the such.

jschiwal · 12-16-2007, 01:43 AM

/sbin/fdisk -l doesn't show a second "Linux LVM" partition? If not, you may not have lvm installed on your Ubuntu live distro.

Code:

sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
Password:

Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              14        2432    19430617+  8e  Linux LVM

From /etc/fstab:

Code:

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1

vertigo88x · 12-16-2007, 01:56 AM

yes fdisk shows the lvm.

but how do i go about accessing it.

jschiwal · 12-16-2007, 06:18 AM

Create a directory to mount it on, and use the fstab line I gave as a guide. Your particular device node may be named differently (than /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00) but it should be similar. You could create two directories under /mnt, one for this partition and the other for mounting the destination.

Code:

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/laptopdrive -o defaults

If it mounts successfully, you may need to run "chown" on your old home directory. Your UID using the Ubuntu live distro may be different than what it was when you were running Linux on the Laptop.

Here are the list of modules in the initrd ramdisk for Fedora Core 6:

Code:

ata_piix.ko   dm-mod.ko       dm-zero.ko   ext3.ko  libata.ko   ohci-hcd.ko  sd_mod.ko
dm-mirror.ko  dm-snapshot.ko  ehci-hcd.ko  jbd.ko   mbcache.ko  scsi_mod.ko  uhci-hcd.ko

If you don't see /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 or /dev/mapper/VolGroup00/LogVol00, you might want to check the output of "/bin/lsmod" and see if the dm-* modules are loaded.

Also look in the lvm manpages. There are several programs for dealing with lvm volumes.