Re: [newbie] Shered VS Delete
Hi Kaj, As for fragmentation, it should not make a difference whether you use delete or shred, the same basic process happens, as far as file allocation is concerned, and fragmentation will still occur. M. I have to disagree. [snip] In Linux - as in all Unixes - fragmentation is a *non-issue*. Sometimes I can really talk without knowing... Sorry about that. I had the misconception that ext2fs had similarities with fat as for file allocation/fragmentation. (what a shame, might you say!) I will keep on reading. Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Shered VS Delete
Hi! Why 20 times? How is it possible to recover a file that has been overwritten once? Because hard drives use magnetic imprints (I don't know the exact term for that), even once the magnetic information has been replaced by other information, the old one should still be present as a kind of ghost magnetic field. Obviously, such a ghost cannot be recovered with the tools provided with any OS. However, I guess that if a well organized institute or electrical engineer opens your hard drive and start analyzing the disks themselves with advanced machines, they could see this ghost and extract the old information out of it. It may sound like pure sci-fi, but I'm sure NSA has just the right tools for the task! ;-) When shred does 10 or 20 overwrites, I guess it alternates the bit patterns at each pass, such as to scramble the ghost information. Because one would have to actually open the hard drive and use advanced machinery to extract information that was overwritten *once*, it does not mean that doing a simple delete is sufficient, since in this case it is not overwritten at all, which allows for a simpler recovery with OS tools. By the way, anybody knows what are the Linux tools for that? Something similar to DOS undelete? Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Shered VS Delete
Thanks for all the replies everybody. I 'assume' then that when shredding file(s) that there is no fragmentation such as there is in the windows os and that the freed space can/is immediately available to be written to? As for fragmentation, it should not make a difference whether you use delete or shred, the same basic process happens, as far as file allocation is concerned, and fragmentation will still occur. M. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
Hi everybody! :) Here is the conclusion to my problem story ;) I finally got my WinXP CD (w/ my luggage) back from the airline... So I could finally try the fixmbr utility, but without success. Also, Partition Magic told me that a couple of things were screwed up and prompted me whether to repair them, which I confirmed. Then I could mount the partition from within Linux, and see how screwed up things really were... 8-| So I decided to start from scratch... In any case, thank you everybody for your nice help and support, even if my endeavors didn't work as expected, it still was a great way to learn (a hard way, I have to admit!) but I'm learning fast! I had to play a lot with LILO, lilo.conf, fstab, and Knoppix, so it's a good start after all! :) Thanks again and see you around... Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] Recommended FS for sharing data w/ Windows?
Hey everybody... I would appreciate some recommendations from you... I need to share my documents between WinXP and Linux. Since NTFS was not recommended as a R/W FS, I went for FAT32. I therefore have the following partitions: hda1 ntfs read-only C: (WinXP) hda5 vfat read-write D: (Data) etc... Since file permissions are not compatible with fat, I have to use the umask option in fstab. However, if I use umask=0, all my standard files become executables, and if I use umask=111, they are only accessible to root. I was wondering whether I should not use ext2 instead, and find some utility in WinXP to mount it... if any such thing exists... Otherwise, what would be best? I'm sure many of you must be facing the same issue... Your inputs would be greatly appreciated. Best regards, Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
Drew, First off is there any thing you need on the Windows partion? What is on it is very valuable, but more the environment as a whole than the individual files. Before installing Linux, I did backup all my data, project source code, emails, contacts, etc. So all this is in a safe place. However, what I would be badly missing is my whole development environment. It is rather complex and a real pain to setup. I evaluate that it would take about one week to be back up and running. So, put shortly, yes it is valuable, but it is not the end of it all. I'll do whatever I can to recover it, but in any case I will survive! ;) If there is try running Knoppix from CD-ROM,this will see all partion on your hard drive and let you copy the files to disc or to a FTP server for This Knoppix really seems intriguing... I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks, Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
Hi Bryan, Here is my fstab: /dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1 none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 /dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2 none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0 Provided the partition is still intact, getting WinXp back is trivial. Boot from the WinXp cd and choose recovery console. Once at the command line, issue the command fixmbr and hit enter. Reboot. Voila, WinXP back again and the world cries for you. Great to know! However, I will have to wait to get my Windows XP CD back with my luggage (hopefully on Monday). However, meanwhile, is there any free utility out there for doing this fixmbr? Thanks, Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
Hi Bryan, The entry on mine reads: /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro 0 0 Try removing the umask and see if it helps. I changed the line so that it reads: /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro 0 0 which is exactly the same as you (I just had to remove the ,umask=0 part from mine). It didn't know exactly how to make the OS consider this change, so I simply rebooted Linux. Then, when I did a ls /mnt/windows, I got the same error message as ever: ls: reading directory /mnt/windows: Input/output error Anyway, thank you for the suggestion. Best regards, Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
yes it mounts as win_cX where X is a number of the partition. In my case: However, in my case when I do a ls /mnt, I get: cdrom/ floppy/ windows/ That is strange... Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] Did I lose my NTFS partition?
Hi everybody! I have a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP installed on a 30GB hard drive (with a single NTFS partition). I wanted to install Mandrake 9.1 with dual boot handled by LILO. I therefore installed Mandrake with the resize Windows partition option. However, it looks like I've lost everything that was on this partition. Is it because, during a resize, only data on a FAT partition can be preserved, and not with NTFS? When I do an ls /mnt/windows, it gives the error ls: reading directory /mnt/windows: Input/output error. Also, when I boot with a DOS boot disk, I can not even see any drive letter (such as C:, D:...) but only the floppy drive A: So I guess the other part of my question is, if I want to reinstall Windows XP, how can I get back my C: drive letter in the first place? Thanks in advance for any pointer, Best regards, Mathieu. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
