hihi

i have a weird question:

background: i had a linux box but i gave it to a girlfriend. it had 2 drives on it: one boot/system drive and one storage drive (100 gigs) just to store files as a backup system. before i gave her the computer, i took out both drives (cuz she had her own from her older computer which went boom).

anyway, so i have my XP windows box and i just installed the storage drive in the secondary slot and the computer can see it in disk management, but it can't access it or mount it and it doesn't give it a label. it just says 'unknown partition' but reads the drive sizes correctly and everything.

how do i mount it? =( i don't have another box to turn into a linux box anymore and i don't want to fiddle with dual boot cuz i don't have the room on my C: drive. =(

what can i do? =(

thanks for any help!

Sadly, as far as I know Linux can read/write NTFS, but Windows can't read any of the more linux-y filesystems like ext2/3 and reiserFS. Unless the drive is formatted with a Fat filesystem like FAT32, XP isn't going to be able to read it, or even recognize that there is a partition existing on it.

Edit: I take it back - there's software to do it, and it looks like the free version will mount in read-only mode, so at least you could get at your files. http://www.topshareware.com/Paragon-...nload-2685.htm

Nothing. You can use a program called Explore2fs (http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm) to read from the drive, but there is no write support for windows. (I assume the partition is ext2/3)

You have to backup the data on your drive, and repartition it for a full linux install, or use a live cd anytime you want to access the data, or reformat the drive to ntfs/fat32, or use it read-only, as mentioned above.