completely new, don't know how to use my external harddrive
 

I have feather linux on a CD. I am using to get files off of my laptop because windows crashed. I want to hook up my external hard drive so i can pull off files. Can you please be really descriptive because i am totally new to this and i don't kow where anythign is thanks for your help.

Aline

I dare say, what you would like to do is 'mount' your external hard drive. Two ways to do this, and I'm assuming you are using a gui ( like KDE or what not)?

The first way is going into your System directory, or Home / Storage Media ( or something similar). You want to right click on /sda1 and try to mount it.

The second way is going into terminal and mounting from there.
Try it, see how it flies. Hope it works, though I must address to you that I am indeed a novice.
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When you load the live cd, you should see a Windows directory. Once you have the external harddrive mounted, you should be able to do some basic copying from that directory to your external hard drive's. *nod*

thanks Net for your post,

i couldn't go into home and find the sda1 file, also i tried mopunting it from the terminal, but i have to say i'm not exactly sure where the targeting is, ( i told you i'm new)i tried the command prompt thing and i used your code but it didn't find anythign it just said that there is no such folder. So any other help would be much appreciated. Thhis really sucks noty being able to get my files:S thanks guys for your help

Aline

Run "dmesg | tail" after you plug the device in and show us the output.

When i put that in the command prompt thing, it came out [-c] [-n level] [-s bufsize]. Is that good?

Aline

No. The middle character is a pipe, not a L or 1. See this for info. FWIW, the output you're seeing from dmesg is telling you how to use dmesg, i.e. what kinds of options you can pass to it. What the pipe character between the two commands does is to send the output of the one on the left to the one on the right as input. tail will print the last 10 lines or so.

ok thanks i retyped it properly and this is what it read,
i810: Intel ICH4 found at IO 0x18c0 and 0x1c00, MEM 0xe0100c00 and 0xe0100800, IRQ 17
i810: Intel ICH4 mmio at 0xdec1cc00 and 0xdec1e800
i810_audio: Primary codec has ID 0
i810_audio: Audio controller supports 6 channels
i810_audio: Defaulting to base 2 channel mode.
i810_audio: Resetting connection 0
i810_audio: Connection 0 with codedc id 0
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: ADS116 (unknown)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 supports AMAP, total channels = 2
b44: eth0: link is down.

i don't know what that means i hope you can tell me and how it relates to my extrenal hard drive. Thanks for all your time

None of that relates to your hard drive, as you can probably tell. Did you run dmesg after plugging in the device?

yes i did right after i plugged it in i tried it a couple of times. what now?

Post the complete output. Also try a different port.

are you talking about usb drive?

how to mount usb drive in linux

You could also monitor /var/log/messages as you plug in the external drive.

sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

You could also list the /dev/sd* devices before and after plugging in the drive. The drive will probably be the new device.
A) ls /dev/sd*
B) plug in the device
C) ls /dev/sd*

You also need to know the filesystem that the external drive has on it. Is it fat32 or ntfs? If it is ntfs, I don't know if feather linux has either "fuse" module support and the "ntfs-3g" package installed or the "ntfs" kernel module. If just the latter, I don't know if you will be able to write to the drive.

If it has ntfs-3g installed, and the external drive's partition is formatted with the NTFS filesystem, then you can mount it like (as root):

The device might be something like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 depending on what is used for the external drive.
Since windows is broken, the filesystem of the windows partition might not be mountable. Are you able to read the Windows files already. If so then it was mounted.