Questions.

[Guest glaston]

I have Mandrake 9 installed on one disk, and WinXP on another disk. I meant for it to be a dual boot, but it only boots Linux. I don't care about using WinXP anymore, I just keep the installation on the disk so I can get all the files off it at some point.

My problems are that 1) It's an NTFS partition, and 2) it's a dynamic disk. And 2000 and XP are the only OS' that can see or use dynamic disks. However, if I convert it back to a basic disk, I think I'll lose all the data on it. I have a 3rd disk which I took out of this machine and put in a WinXP machine with a cd-writer so I can take the files off, and convert it to basic and delete the partition, then put the disk back in my Linux machine and format it for use as a backup disk.

 

My question is if VMware can assist me in any way here? If I install a guest OS of WinXP, will that guest system be able to read the XP disk which is in my system already?

It's a 10GB disk, and almost full. The other is a 20GB disk and has 5GB left, but it's all media files. And my Linux boot disk is also a 10GB disk.

My goal here is to get all my files from the other 2 disks so i can have use of all 3 disks under Linux. My Linux machine doesn't have a cd-burner, so even if I boot to it, I don't have a way to get the files off it. Ideally, VMware could give me access to that disk in a WinXP guest installation, and let me transfer my files directly to the Linux host system. Then inside the guest OS, I could delete the partition and convert it back to basic. Then, my Linux system should see the disk and let me use it.

Does anyone know if this solution is possible? If not, does anyone have any suggestions for my dilemma?

Yes, I know I should've taken other precautions before installing Linux, and should've done the dual boot correctly. But I didn't, and here I am now with this problem. And I can't go back and do it different now.

So what I need is some sort of solution to this. Short of pulling this XP disk out, and putting it in another machine to write the files to CD.

I thought of using Samba to transfer via the network, and pulling the files from the disks after putting them in another system and making them available as a share. However, i can't even locate Samba let alone configure it on the system. I downloaded it, but as usual, it needs all these other libraries to compile which aren't included with Samba.

I'm a new Linux user. And doing alot of command line operations, compiling, passing options to the kernel isn't within my ability. I'm learning though!

If the solution to this is gonna involve alot of potentially damaging, in depth technical command line and compiling, passing options to the kernel, etc.. I'd rather just pull out the disk and put it in another machine for now!

[Cannonfodder]

What is a dynamic disk? is that similar to a compressed disk?

 

Was XP your only hard drive in the past? If so, can you restore your computer to the same configuration by temporarily disconnecting your other hard drives and reconnecting the xp drive to the original IDE? If you do this, you need to restore your boot manager. Boot into linux and type lilo -u to uninstall it.

[Guest glaston]

A dynamic disk gives you the ability to setup software RAID volumes out of seperate drives. Originally, a few years back, under Win2k, I had a 10GB disk, and my 20GB setup as one spanned volume. When I switched to XP, I split those disks up and had 3 different volumes. However, I didn't convert them back to basic at that time.

Earlier today I said "F" it and went into diskdrake and deleted the partition on the XP boot drive. Then formatted it into journalized ext3 and mounted it. The thing is, it gave me a bunch of options. to mount it in /usr, /var, /mnt/windows. I chose /mnt/windows because it was the only one to make any sense to me. Is the /mnt/windows work like a normal disk? As the /usr said it had files already there, and I could either hide those files, or copy them to the new /usr mount point. What mount points should I have for the 2nd disk if I just want it as an applications and backup disk? I also don't understand how the whole /mnt thing works. Basically, how do I get the functionality of all three drives in Linux? And how do I go about saving and moving files to the backup disk? I need a document that tells me how disks work in Linux, in comparison to windows? Also, in Win, to get the properties of a drive, you just right click it and go to properties. I can't seem to find out how to see the properties and disk space usage on my disks so I know that they are even known to the system

In WinXP it was like this:

F: System disk

D: Applications disk

M: Media disk

I don't know what the logistics behind it is. I want to keep my Linux boot disk as is, and add the 2nd 10GB drive as a backup. What /mnt point should I have chosen for that? What does /mnt/windows do?

The drive doesn't have anything on it yet. So if I need to change it, it won't destroy anything.

In WinXP, I had the first 10gb drive as system(boot), the 2nd 10gb as my applications drive, and the 20gb was dedicated to project files and media files. That's the type of config I want to setup in Linux. I have the boot disk already setup, and the 2nd disk is ready, I just don't know how to make it an actual disk that I can access and put files on.

I can't find the equivelant to C: under Linux. I simply don't understand how the file system is setup in Linux. It seems illogical the way disks are setup under Linux. And most documentation assumes you already have Linux knowledge, so it only confuses me more. Is my boot disk mounted at /mnt/disk? Just like /mnt/floppy or /mnt/cdrom? How can I make the 2nd disk just another disk in the /mnt directory, instead of /mnt/windows, or /mnt/boot?

Damn this is confusing!!!!

 

If I wanted to save a file directly from the web to my backup disk, how do I do that? Where can I find the root of each disk that is the Linux equivelent of root windows disks like C:?