Hi all,

I have got a problem with my system. my windows vista(home basic)crashed and suddenly it is known to me that my partitions were logical (not primary so that i could reinstall my windows again without affecting my data).My machine is having 64 bit AMD turion X2. I have a live Ubuntu 8.10 CD and i can excess my data from there. I am looking for a way so that I can connect my system to another XP machine to transfer the Data and then format my whole system to install the linux.

Kindly help me.

If I understand you correctly, you want to hook up your system to another xp box and transfer the data across?

Any idea how you managed to get Vista installed that way originally?

Are both systems together on a LAN?

You could create a directory on the Windows system and set it to shared with write permission for the group "everyone". Then copy your files there across the LAN using the Linux liveCD. (Linux can access a Windows share as a specific user with password if the LAN you must do this on isn't private and fire walled well enough to drop all security this way. But if you don't need that security, you might not want to create those extra ways to get the details wrong).

The liveCD I'm used to is Mepis. That makes it very easy to bring up Konqueror (the standard file browser of KDE) and access Windows shares through Konqueror's SMB: support (without doing a separate mount step). The GUI also makes mounting NTFS partitions easy and obvious in a couple different ways, but I forget the details. Drag/drop copying is very intuitive in Konqueror in that situation even if you don't know Linux at all.

I'm not sure where any of that is in the Ubuntu liveCD. I'm sure all those things are possible, but maybe you would need to know the right command line syntax for mounting the SMB share and the NTFS partition.

If you want a connection other than a LAN, probably a Linux liveCD isn't the right tool. I would probably just open both computer cases and move the hard drive temporarily to the target system and copy very directly using only the copy of Windows on the target computer.

john,

initially my laptop came with one drive and one recovery (both primary) then to make partitions i had used acronis partition manager and it did all the logical partitioning and made my HD what it is.

To james,

Yes, I exactly want to do that and then thing is like, I am a new user to Linux as well so i am not very aware about many things in that.In general, if my data is safe then I can think of anything else.

I just tried this with konqueror in Centos on the LAN at work. It was a lot less intuitive than I recall from a long time ago with a Mepis liveCD at home. I thought it was an obvious pure GUI process and I didn't need to know any syntax nor weird actions. Just now, I needed to click on the Flag icon on the left (how would a beginner know that) to get to "Services" so I could get to "LAN Browser", which I think would work in Mepis liveCD, but in Centos needs to be configured first and it gives you no hint how.

Instead of all that, in case you do have Konqueror (which is in KUbuntu, but I'm not sure about Unbuntu) and smb isn't obvious in pure GUI, you can type in the address bar
smb://computer_name/share_name
That address syntax is NOT a general Linux thing. It a Konqueror thing. To access the same Windows share outside of Konqueror, you need to mount it so it becomes part of the Linux directory tree.

@eragon: Its a little difficult to walk someone through this, or I should say a bit time consuming, so I'll come right out and suggest an external hard drive would be a lot easier. Still, you asked for a specific way, so lets accomodate that.

First, you're going to need to set up something on the windows machine to allow file transfers. I'm going to suggest nfs- it is clean, it is tidy and I'm guessing you have more experience in Windows than Linux, so it'd make sense to give you instructions where the more techie stuff is windows side. NFS stands for Network File System, so I'm sure you can guess what we'll be using it for.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324055

Is a good (probably, no way to check for me, seems sound) to set this up on the windows side, though it sounds like you may need to burn some disk (If not, I'm pretty sure there are other guides to do the same). On the linux end, under the live cd, you just need to set up an nfs-server and then mount which ever directory (I'd reccommend what was your C drive under vista ) you want under XP. This will then be visible on the XP box and you can copy everything off.

On the Linux side you will need to open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter the following
then give us the output of
And I can walk you through the rest (Its just so we know which the windows stuff is on to share, you see)