I'm not sure if this is the right place for it, so if this needs to be moved, that's fine.

First, hardware specs:
Asus A8N32-SLI deluxe
AMD 64X2 4200+
eVGA Geforce 7800
Seagate 200GB...something. I forget.
(I'm broke now, by the way, heh)


I have an FC4 installation on my HDD (I have one HDD) that was setup with multiple partitions wherein the boot partition is the primary. I used the default partitioning setup, IIRC. I did some stuff that messed up my XVideo drivers, so it can't start X (can't render anything---Xorg -configure gives me that error, along with "can't find mouse"), but I want to install the 64 bit FC4 (I have the CDs for it now), so I was going to format the drive anyway. The problem is that I have several gigabytes of stuff I need to get off the drive before I can do that (I don't have a DVD writer, in case you were wondering), which means I have to be able to access the HDD from other computers (all the other comps in my house are windows boxes with NTFS drives). The problem I've run into so far is that everything else only sees the boot partition (the primary partition). My FC4 installation can see the other partitions just fine. I'm running the Knoppix 4.0.2 live-CD right now, and it only sees the boot partition. I've tried accessing it from a Windows box with rfstool, which turned up nothing (I have no ReiserFS partitions, so this makes sense) and with various ext2 viewers (which also see ext3 partitions), which only found the boot partition.

I just don't understand why FC4 can see the other partitions and nothing else can. They should be automatically detected, right? It seems to be a systematic problem though, since the ext2 viewers and Knoppix each found the exact same partition and nothing else. So, what can I do about this? I just need to get those several gigabytes off the drive into temporary storage.

The default installation creates 2 partitions, /boot and a Logical Volume Mangement (LVM) partition which contains everything else i.e. / and swap. The partitions are ext3 but unless you have LVM support you will not be able to see them and I do not think that Knoppix liveCD has LVM support loaded by default.

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/LVM2

Are these computers networked where you could copy the files via ssh, ftp or samba?

The computers are networked together, but we've never been able to get them talking properly. I guess I could try to SSH in through one of the other computers, but I'm not sure how well that would work. I'm guessing I'd have to be running FC4 at the time (unless I can get LVM support in Knoppix)?

as for the wiki, when attempting to install LVM support, the first thing to do is:
But when I try that, I get:
Is that normal...? Also, are there any file viewers for Windows that can handle LVM? If so, I can just plug my HDD into one of the other computers and get the stuff that way. It'd probably be quicker than attempting to access via SSH or FTP.

You need to login as root. In a console window type in the command
su -
(no password required)

No actual experience but explore2fs for windows is supposed to support LVM.
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

OK, I su'ed, and it detects properly. I got it mounted too. Oh, explore2fs is one of the programs I tried to use, and it only found the boot partition. The man page for mount shows options for NTFS HDDs. Would it be possible to just mount an NTFS HDD, then? If so, would I have write access? If so, then I could just do everything from Knoppix, it looks like...

knoppix does have NTFS write support but IMHO use it on a non critical data partition in case the filesystem becomes corrupted.