Linux Machine as Windows Archive
 

The title might be a bit misleading but we have a computer here with 2 hard drives mostly full and probably infected with some sort of virus but theres still important stuff on those drives that no one can organize without going insane.

So my plan is to take those two drives and put them in a Linux machine I'll put together and set up a samba share.

My question is whether I should use Ubuntu or Fedora. I've never really got a samba share to work on either, those I do use Fedora/Red Hat servers a lot more for work for our web servers. Which os would be easier to mount the NTFS partitions and set up a Samaba share?

Thanks

Why don't you consider instead booting from a livecd, and transferring the contents of your disks over the network using a simpler protocol, one that won't be hindered by a possibly infected host?

How large are the drives?

I personnaly use ubuntu here is a good article on it

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubunt...ver-on-ubuntu/

I actually use webmin to setup samba as its easier for me to have a gui

Regards
JKZfixme

oh yeah you can find webmin here www.webmin.com/ and it is one of the most awesome system admin tools in my opinion also helps bridgeing the gab between where distros put conf files as most of them are found and readily editable from the tabs , also like the web interface

Regards
JKZfixme

The computer in question has 2 hard drives, each with about 500 gb of stuff on it. Also, we don't really have any where else in the network to store it.

Ok, so pick whichever OS seems easier for you. I can't recommend one or the other, because I don't know your skill set, organizational needs, etc. You're going to have to make your own choice here.

Do you have a backup of your data? If not, it sounds like now is an excellent time to purchase another large drive so that you can make backups of your critical (yet infected) data.

Personally, I think it is foolhardy to knowingly place infected data onto a Windows network, regardless of the OS serving the data. You need to get those disks virus-free.

Yes, i think the last poster is right, cant you just *mount* them under Linux and remove whatever you want? If you access computers with a Win virus from Win computers, maybe they could do something with the computer you're accessing from.....?