2009/6/6 Chris. Aubrey-Smith <cas...@gmail.com>: > I haven't used W*nd*ws for years, but I'm obliged to set up a machine for a > friend who steadfastly refuses to use anything else. > > I have taken the precaution, from time to time, of backing up files from her > Dell notebook (XP Home Edition) to a USB disc. She now has a new(er) machine > running XP Professional and I'm trying to restore the files from that USB > disc. > > The disc seems to automount, the drive is reported as being present and I > can unmount it successfully. But, where the hell are the files? The last > time I used w*nd*ws, an added disc drive would simply be allocated the next > drive letter in the sequence and would be accessible through that. That's > not happening, and I've tried three different drives so far, all of which > work perfectly well on my Debian machines. > > I discovered (somewhere) that the disc was mounted at 'location 0', whatever > that means, but I can't find any way of accessing it. > > I'm sorry to have to bother you Linux types with such a problem, but I'm > getting desperate: how do I access these files? > > Chris. >
OT is a bit of an understatement here. Windows is very fussy regarding the partition table on USB flash sticks. My advice is to plug the flash stick into a Linux box, backup all the contents of the USB flash stick. Use Linux to remove the partition table from the USB flash stick. Place the USB flash stick back in the Windows machine, format it in the windows machine and then copy the files needed back onto it from the Linux machine. Summary: Windows can only use: 1) No partition table at all, much like a floppy disk 2) Only one primary partition on the flash disk. So, having a single flash disk that can boot into Linux and also having a partition that is readable by Windows is not possible. Note: Vista is the same as XP in this regards, except the Vista has a new flash file system that Linux cannot write to yet. (only read) -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
