Ever since I installed mandrake, my windows partition has gone steadily downhill, which to me, means that it's time to reformat, and reinstall windows. The only problem is that I need my music, videos, and documents off of the windows drive before I reformat so I don't lose all that stuff. Can someone tell me how I can go about doing this? I have a lot of files to move, so I prefer to do it whole folders at a time if possible. If not, well then I will live...

You should currently be able to see your windows partition under /mnt/windows or /mnt/C. Mandrake mounts it by default I believe. If not, then tell us your partition and hardware setup and we can help you mount it.

i found a tutorial, that told me to do this and i was able to access my windows partitions and grab my mp3's (didn't touch anything else)

open consol type: su
password

type : mount -a -t msdos

and then ALL windows partitons are mounted, i had to go to

/mnt/###
to view them but hey that wasn't really a problem.


hope that helps!

I typed that in the console, it said that windows is a directory, and then didn't do anything. So I hit cd windows, hoping dos commands would work... it changed directory, but now dir/p dont work, so I am stuck here...

ok... dir worked, but now I don't know how to switch directories from there...

Word of advice to all linux programmers and designers... Make the console act like DOS. To someone who is unfamiliar with linux like me, this is a nightmare! There is nothing wrong with making software that is easy to learn.

As soon as I begin college and get my computer science degree, I plan to come back to this and design some software that is easy to use as windows or at bare minimum DOS. I don't see any reason why this can't be done. Maybe there is a distro that is already like this, and I am just missing it...

Think I need a tutorial, anyone know where to find a good one?

i dunno about tutorials, but google for linux consol commands.

or somthing like that

windows dir = ls on Linux

thats about all i know : oX

but i personally can't see why you can't dbl click on home, click the ^ arrow a few times dbl click on mnt and access the folders that way ?

thats how i did it. maybe i was lucky for once : o)



[edit]ooopsey wrong os command : oP[/edit]

WOW! That worked! Thanks! I was under the impression that you had to do it from the console for some reason! I STILL think the console would be better off following DOS commands though. And I wish there was a way to cut and paste the files from windows to linux, rather then copy them, since there is almost 16 gigs of files I am moving. I need to resize my partitions so windows gets the minimum space needed to run properly. Even despite the trouble I am having with linux, I HATE M$! would rather use them little as possible. Don't ya hate it, when you hate an OS you know like the back of your hand?!

I think when we setup linux, we can mount paritition ntfs in that, after setup linux finished, we needs mount in terminal. that's all

You can use aliases for Linux commands so they would look like DOS ones. There's no need for one to rethink the names of Linux commands just to make it easy for someone used to use to DOS.
See http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginne...ect_03_05.html for using and creating aliases.

mandrake uses a lot of commands that are DOS like..

cd /dir works to change your directory

dir and ls both display contents...

The commands for the console might be slightly different beyond that, but it is far more intuitive than dos, imho.

I agree that the learning curve is steeper because linux commands don't = dos commands, but at least in the instance of ls, they can be "better." ls is shorter and uses letters on the home row...

If you get a change you might want to make a partition for data next time, i use a ext3 partition for general data and another for multimedia, there are free drivers out there so you can read ext2/3 in windows.

If you dont want to have your data of microshaft land you can make a data partition in fat32.

that way you will have them in a safe place, since microshaft winblows needs constant reformats.
Cheers