Can I use Mepis to find files on the C drive of a windows machine? A lady at work has had a hard drive to crash and she has some important info I need to save. I have tried to make it a slave in another PC but I can't get it to recognize it. I hope it hasn't died completely.

Anyway, if I can use Mepis where/how do I find the files? I've been looking around but I can't find the C drive?

thank you for any help

Okay I just tried to Knoppix and it came up on my desktop like I thought it should do. So what steps could I do to troubleshoot this with Mepis? I currently have Mepis running at home because I am trying to learn it.

thank you

Mepis should also have the drives, but it may not... what version of mepis are you using?

How many CDroms does the machine have? is one a cd (or dvd) burner?

Your best bet might be to boot from the non-burning CDROM drive and burn the files using k3b onto a disk; you could also copy them to a USB stick or something similar. To find the drive, go to a command prompt and type:
df -h [enter]
which will list the disks and their free space. hda1 is MOST LIKELY the Windows C:\ drive, so become root:
su [enter]
(password is "root" on live CD)[enter]
then mount the hda1 drive somewhere:
mount /dev/hda1 /home/demo/Desktop/windows [enter] (note this requires you to make a folder on the desktop named "windows")

then browse away, if it worked, and use k3b to burn the data onto disks. if the disk drive is corrupt you may not be able to mount it. if it is NTFS you may not be able to even read it (but Mepis has been good for me in this before).

If you only have one CDROM drive, a smaller distro like DSL might help (you can run it as "toram" at the boot prompt and then remove the cd when fully booted) but these smaller distros have kinda confusing burning programs.

Or add another disk (hdb1 - don't let it be Windows' NTFS filesystem), mount both as discribed above (both cannot be mounted to "windows" though - different places!!) and copy from one to the other.

luck to you, let us know how it goes!

Hi there if your hard disk is reconised by your PC it should come up in the BIOS have you set the jumper on the hard disk?. any way the hard disk should not come up as C drive like in windows you have to mount it every time you want to access the files on the given hard disk and unmount it every time you are not using it you can do this by going to KwikDisk in mepis it is a icon usually on the right hand side which has 3 little coloured boxes. now if your computer has reconisd your hard disk it will come up but you will need to mount the drive [seems hard to understand to new users. mount unmount] rember it will not be called C drive. you will see that there are some mounted drives these ones will have a red box over the mounted
drives what you are looking for is one with out a red box around the hard disk icon, click on that if all goes will konqure will open the files

I have to mount because a prtiton as I have lots of MP3's
and have to mount it as linux will not play them until the drive is mounted

it will probley come up as some thing like [but not exactly]

/mmt/hdb2

or may be some thing else

have you recovered the data form the disk yet? if you did this in knoppix then you can get it to work in mepis, that would meen this hard disk works