tell me how to copy the device files(files in "/dev" directory) from linux to windows without making any changes to major and minor numbers??

first of all you look your /etc/fstab

look for your C:\ its look like /dev/hda0 or 1....

mount it# mount /dev/hda0 /mnt

on that you will see all your window files...then use cp to copy...

hope it helps

by the way I am talking of computers with dual boot. boot to xp and linux.

I wonder what do you want to do.

/dev only holds device nodes. These have absolutely no meaning in windows so why do you want to copy them? Fat and ntfs do not support device nodes as such either. You could copy them as regular files. I don't know what the result will be, but in any case it would be useless (if you succeed at all to copy it).

So, I suggest you to reword your question, and to let us know why do you think that minor and major numbers of the device nodes has anything to do with your question. Right now I can't understand your purpose.

Why do you want to do that? Are you trying to backup your /dev directory?

As far as I know, windows has no equivalent of device files. So if you are trying to save them to windows machine, you should put them into tar archive, otherwise you'll have trouble copying some of them back. You backup /dev by running
from any directory where you have write permissions. This will create dev.tar archive. Notice that it won't save data in the device nodes (i.e. it won't save contents of your harddrives into archives), only nodes itself - where are they located and what are the called. The archive will take approximately 2 megabytes.

If you want to backup data from devices (contents of harddrives, for example), then just copy files to windows machine.

Is it really needed to backup your /dev directory? may be you need to backup your system before formatting it, but new installation will create it regardless you back it up or not. Also, every system will have its own /dev depending on the system hardware, so there is no need to back it up. Rather it will not function on other systems with other hardware.

ok thank you for your valuable replies..

With all due respect, that's not much of an answer for several members who have requested clarification of what you are doing.

Why is my homework detector flickering?