Can I Mount Win98/XP HDD, via USB Case, in Ubuntu?
 

i'm about to wipe an old Win98 or XP HDD and use it to back up my current home directory, but i'd like to view the contents first. can i do that in ubuntu?

tia...

You most certainly can. In fact, you can do it with any modern Linux distro. If you're using a USB hard drive, or an internal HDD with a converter case, just start your computer and plug the disk into your USB port. Depending on you're personal settings and Ubuntu version, either a box will come up asking you what to do with the HDD, or you will see an icon for the drive appear on your desktop, maybe both. Keep in mind that in order to access the contents of any storage device with Linux, you have to first "mount" the device. With box appearing, just choose to the mount option. With icon on your desktop, you right click and select the mount option.

Furthermore, Linux has a completely different naming convention for devices. Instead of calling disk drives C, D, A, and so on, Linux uses a method that involves extreme abbreviations. For example, "Drive C" could be identified as hda1. "hd" stands for "hard disk", "a" is the first such device detected, and "1" refers to the first partition on that drive. Now for the confusing part with USB drives. In Linux, your USB drive may be identified as sda1. In this case, the first two letters(sd) stand for "SCSI emulated disk". SCSI is a close cousin of USB, so to speak. You can read the Wikipedia article hear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi

Because you seem to have just gotten started with Linux, I think you read with article and most of the articles linked to it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Please let me know if this helps you.

You most certainly can. In fact, you can do it with any modern Linux distro. If you're using a USB hard drive, or an internal HDD with a converter case, just start your computer and plug the disk into your USB port. Depending on you're personal settings and Ubuntu version, either a box will come up asking you what to do with the HDD, or you will see an icon for the drive appear on your desktop, maybe both. Keep in mind that in order to access the contents of any storage device with Linux, you have to first "mount" the device. With box appearing, just choose to the mount option. With icon on your desktop, you right click and select the mount option.

Furthermore, Linux has a completely different naming convention for devices. Instead of calling disk drives C, D, A, and so on, Linux uses a method that involves extreme abbreviations. For example, "Drive C" could be identified as hda1. "hd" stands for "hard disk", "a" is the first such device detected, and "1" refers to the first partition on that drive. Now for the confusing part with USB drives. In Linux, your USB drive may be identified as sda1. In this case, the first two letters(sd) stand for "SCSI emulated disk". SCSI is a close cousin of USB, so to speak. You can read the Wikipedia article hear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi

Because you seem to have just gotten started with Linux, I think you read with article and most of the articles linked to it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Please let me know if this helps you.

Sorry for the double post, my net connection is on the fritz right now. I was trying to just edit the first one. Also, I recommend reformatting the Windows drive as ext3, so it give you better performance under Linux. You can use GpartED for that http://gparted.sourceforge.net/. Best graphical formatting program I ever used.

the hdd doesn't show up on my desktop, however, qtparted did pick it up as sda1. what can i do to get access to its files?

Then you must have different settings then the default. Open up a terminal and type in "mount /dev/sda1" (without the quotes). If it gives you an error having to do with "insufficient rights" or something, try doing "sudo mount /dev/sda1" (again, without the quotes). Whenever you use sudo, you execute the command as root (administrator or "super user"). If the terminal prompts you for a password, just give it whatever password you created for the root account during the installation process. If this fails, then the drive you are trying to access is definitely Windows XP, which uses the NTFS file system. Ubuntu doesn't ship with the libraries and drivers necessary to mount such drives. You have to open up Synaptic and search for "ntfs". Assuming you are using a home Internet connection(I'm stuck at a public library), you will get a list of packages. One of these packages should be "ntfsprogs". Check the description before installation.

After viewing the files on the disk, the best way to wipe it clean is to install and use "gparted. It's a great graphical formatting program that uses menus and the mouse to format drives. Again, search for it with Synaptic. I recommend formatting the drive to ext2 or ext3, so that it works better with your Ubuntu linux system. If you think you will ever need access the drive later from a Windows computer, format it to FAT32. Note that you can easily put as many file systems as you want on the drive, and they can be almost any size. Just don't go nuts on anything USB related. My personal rule of thumb for formatting USB drives is no more then three partitions(file systems) for an HDD, and no more then two partitions for a jump drive(also called flash drives, memory sticks, and thumb drives). If you have any problems, such as gparted won't format the drive to a certain file system, check the documentation and the features list found here http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php and make sure the proper packages are installed on your system. Also, gparted requires root privileges to use.