jetpower

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Hello,

I'm a total Newbie w/Linux! This said, I read the DOS 2.1 manual long ago, which has made me look smarter than many cert monsters over the years...

Another tech gave me a Knoppix disc awhile back; it's coming in handy today (we both knew it would).

Having undertaken the task of recovering data from a friend's (MS OS) laptop after it crashed, I've booted with Knoppix 3.9, with which I can see his drive contents.

He wants to offload his data to a USB stick.

With 3.9, can I run an existing command which will make the USB stick available, or do I need to locate an applet or script to do this?

Thanks in advance for all direction!

Tinkster

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

Knoppix 3.9 ( ~ 4 years old ) is a bit dated ... what does it say
when you do an
lspci | grep -i usb
in a terminal?


Cheers,
Tink

jetpower

Thanks! lspci | grep -i usb yields the following:

0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #3) (rev 02)

The comamnd appears to have located two odd-numbered USB hubs. Interesting. In fact, the KinfoCenter shows them, plus the PNY jump drive I just attached to #1.

Cool interface! So now that we know that our OS sees the hubs, how do we get it to display the device for opening on the desktop? Restart, or is there something better?

This is exciting! Tx for info!

Tinkster

after plugging the stick in, try a
dmesg
and check the output of
fdisk -l

If you see a sd device (scsi disk, that's what Linux sees USB hdds as)
you should be able to mount it to any mount-point

E.g.

mount -t auto /dev/sdXY /mnt

where X is the devices alpha component, and Y is the partition number,
commonly 1 on usb sticks.



Cheers,
Tink

jetpower

Thanks; I can feel the learning curve already.

I saw a SCSI disk, but nothing was attached to it. Restarting did recognize the stick, and the desktop sees it as Hard Disk Partition uba1, /deb/uba1 at /mnt/uba1.

After making it as writable as possible, I was able to save folders to it. However, W*doze didn't see the content. So, I went back to square 2 and formatted the stick to FAT32.

After returning it to the laptop, I'm copying content again; it's populating as I type.

However, I know they'll have to read this in W*doze. Should I be formatting the stick with a dual-compatible OS, or can I find an applet which they can install on their new MS machine to read the files from the stick?

Thanks!

Tinkster

fat32 should work just fine - uba is a very odd device name, though.

jetpower

What can I say - it's a Dell...

So, here is the structure and content as viewed in knoppix:

/mnt/uba1/New Text Document.txt [my initial test file saved in XP]

Home Folder
Desktop
[Folder 1]/files
[Folder 2]/files
et cetera


The stick is a PNY, with 8 nominal gigabytes of storage. For whatever reason, it's holding only about 4 GB. This is ok; I can offload the content, wipe it and come back to get the rest.

However, the stick's properties report that it is empty, and W*doze still doesn't see the content that I loaded in knoppix. Is there a "commit" command that completes the copy process?

Tx for info...
=================

Scratch the 8G concern - I was just reminded of the FAT32 limitation, and read a bit about the knoppix space requirement.

So, I just need to understand this: How do I confirm I've saved the files to the stick?

Tinkster

As I said: I *don't* think that uba is the stick.

When you do fdisk -l with the stick inserted ... how many devices
and what partitions do you see?



Cheers,
Tink

jetpower

Thanks; the reason I believe uba1 is the stick is that I can see the text file that I had copied to it in W*doze after formatting the stick to FAT32. I'm not on the machine now, but I'm pretty sure that the hard drive was listed as hda1.

When I open uba1, the W*doze text file shows up in its apparent root (/mnt/uba1/New Text Document.txt), while all the documents I think I copied to it in knoppix show up on uba1's desktop - but only in knoppix.

I'm either confused, or I'm confused and missing something. Where should I see those files, and why can't I put them on the root of uba1?

Tinkster

When you issue the command "mount", what do you see (when the
stick is inserted and the New Text* is visible)?

jetpower

knoppix@0[knoppix]$ mount

/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hdb on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
/dev/cloop on /KNOPPIX type iso9660 (ro)
/ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=401524k)
/UNIONFS on /UNIONFS type unionfs (rw,noatime,dirs=/ramdisk=rw:/KNOPPIX=ro)
/UNIONFS/dev/pts on /UNIONFS/dev/pts type devpts (rw)
/proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw,devmode=0666)
automount(pid2309) on /mnt/auto type autofs (rw,fd=4,pgrp=2309,minproto=2,maxproto=4)
/UNIONFS/dev/uba1 on /mnt/uba1 type vfat (ro,nosuid,nodev,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000)

If I read this right, it claims that the fat volume on uba1 is read-only, even though I set its permissions as open as possible. User knoppix is owner, in knoppix group. I just created a text file on the desktop, and it won't copy to the /mnt/uba1 volume.

Aha! The context menu has Actions! The volume has a read/write lock! We've got it!

Unmount... Connect to XP... Voila - copied files are visible! We are in business! Thank you so much for leading me through Lesson One!