Howdy...basically the story is this, my Windows computer that I used for producing music fried out on me, and there's some files that I would like to retrieve from the hard drive. I'm pretty sure the hard drive itself is ok, no virus's or anything. So, essentially my question is this, what do I need to do to install the hard drive and be able to read the files on that drive without disturbing anything? I'm not concerned with booting to Windows or anything, just getting some .mp3s from that drive copied to Linux drive. The physical part of the installation I understand, I'm just fuzzy of getting Linux to read it. I'm using the current testing version of Debian....any thoughts or advice? Or is there a better way to go about this, keeping in mind I'm broke? Thanks everybody....

It's no big deal.

Install the disk, and boot. Check your boot messages (like with dmesg) and figure out where it was attached (most likely /dev/hdb).

Run "fdisk -l" on the disk (from the previous step) to figure out what partition the files are in.

Make yourself a directory somewhere to mount on (or you could just use /mnt), and do "mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt". (I'm assuming it's an NTFS disk, and that the files turned out to be in /dev/hdb1.

Note that you won't be able to write to the disk if it's NTFS, but you'll be able to copy the stuff off, from under /mnt.

Thank you much...gonna try that out...