Hello,

I'm brand new to this forum so bare with me here, I have a laptop that is dual booted with windows and Red Hat 8, i have my ntfs partition mounted on /mnt/dev/hda5, i can see the data and wish to transfer the data on that partiton to another windows machine on my LAN so that I can wipe windows. My question is what is the best way to do that, should I use FTP? and if so how? i have tried FTP'ing from my widows machine into linux but it gives me an "unknown error" i did a service ftp start on my linux box, but it says that it's an unknown service, do I need to set up a FTP server on my linux box just to transer a few files?

Or is there a better way to do it? i.e samba, or anything else that may work.

Thanks in Advance......

Well if you have mounted your ntfs partition you can simply copy the files off of /mnt/dev/hda5 to your linux partition.

There are many ftp packages so a:

service ftp start

would not work. You would have to do:

service vsftpd start

or whatever ftp application you are using.

thanks that helped, I tried a vsftpd start and here is what I got:

# service vsftpd start
vsftpd: unrecognized service

does that mean that i don't have the package installed?

I copied the files over to my linux partiton but I want to get them over to my other machine which is running windows, what would be the best way to do that? still ftp? how can I get linux to respond to my ftp requests from my windows machine?


Thanks again......

Well if you have a cd burner you could burn them to cd. How much are you trying to copy? If your trying to copy a couple gigs worth of stuff then you could be ftp'ing for a while.

Yes you have to have the vsftpd package installed first before you do a:

service vsftpd start

Just to be fair there are a lot more ftp packages available like pro-ftp and wu-ftp. Do a search for these if you want to see what the differences are between them.

Okay, you have two machines on same network I presume right?

If you have Machine A with a dual boot of Windows and Linux and Machine B with Windows, why not just boot into Windows and copy your files over to the other Windows machine thru the network. That would eliminate FTP and maybe setting up Samba to transfer from Linux to Windows.. etc.

Did I understand you correctly? If not, then ignore me. But from what I've read so far, that is how you have your setup for these two machines.

thanks for the info guys, the reason why I can't boot into windows and just copy the files over that way is because when I installed linux i overwrote the nt bootloader with grub and now I can't boot into windows, I want to back up my data before I attempt to fix it, i guess the best way to go would be to install an ftp package and ftp them over my LAN then huh, since I don't have a CD burner, it is a copule of gigs though........

Why not configure your bootloader you overwrote it with to boot into Windows? Either Lilo or Grub, whichever your using shouldn't be that hard of a task to configure, its asked, answered and done all the time.

Have a look around the forums, I believe going any other way is just more of a hassle and more steps involved.

Thanks for the info, I tried configuring the grub.conf file to load windows, heck I even reverted to lilo to see if it would work, my problem is that, from what I understand, grub does not directly support NTFS filesystems, (hence the "chainloader + 1 option in the grub.conf file), my understanding is that it simply hands off the job to the NT boot loader which then loads windows XP, my problem is that I overwrote the NT bootloader when I installed red hat and because I originally had windows 2000 and windows XP dual booted and to save some disk space I deleted the win2k partition and installed linux on it, unfortunately I didn't realize that win2k was the primary partition which had the NT bootloader on it, and XP was on a extended partition. Now it's unbootable, because I can't get the NT bootloader to see the XP partition.