Re: moving a drive from one box to another

usabdasc@xxxxxxx wrote:
I had all my really important files backed up, but there are files on the drive I would like to recover. Other than recovering these files I would love to wipe the drive clean and set it up with Ubuntu 7.x and a clean install of Win2K. Can I move the drive to another Ubuntu box and mount the NTFS and EXT3 partitions? It sounds possible, but I hate to try it without knowing that it will work and getting some advice on how to do it. I don't want to boot from this drive, just recover files from it. I believe the drive is still good since the Ubuntu boots (no GUI yet due to new motherboard and different video chips) and the Win2K booted several times.

Will this work? Any advice? What would be common mistakes when doing this and how can I avoid them?

Thanks,
Bruce
You should be able to mount the NTFS and the ext3 partitions on another machine. The drive will hopefully be mounted in a subdirectory of /media for you, but if it isn't issuing a straightforward mount command as root will work for both filesystems. If you suspect the second machine has no NTFS support check that the ntfs-3g package is installed. If you're concerned about accidentally causing damage to your files or filesystems you can pass the -r option when mounting to mount them read-only.

I would watch out if the Windows machine died and left the NTFS filesystem in a mounted state. NTFS has some sort of journalling system that needs to be cleanly unmounted to preserve data integrity. If this is the case then the machine may refuse to mount it, or maybe pass you an option to force it.

Hope this helps,
Tom

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