reading unix hard drive from windows?

[memo]

i'm trying to access a unix hard drive that was an external drive. is there a way to attach it to an ide channel in an XP box to access the files?

if not i am assuming that formating the hard drive will not be difficult correct?

 

[Armitage]

Depends what file system was used. If it was an external drive, there is a fair chance it was formatted FAT32. Plug it in and see. If not, then it should be easy enough to reformat (losing all the data of course)

 

[HKSturboKID]

or connect the external hd to a windows computer and share it.

Use the smbclient on linux to connect to the share.

 

[memo]

Originally posted by: Armitage
Depends what file system was used. If it was an external drive, there is a fair chance it was formatted FAT32. Plug it in and see. If not, then it should be easy enough to reformat (losing all the data of course)

i wasn't aware that unix uses FAT32...

 

[memo]

Originally posted by: HKSturboKID
or connect the external hd to a windows computer and share it.

Use the smbclient on linux to connect to the share.

sorry should have made it clearer, we're not the most unix savvy people on the world. is there way, if its not formatted in FAT or NTFS, that we could access the data form the XP GUI? am I wrong to assume that it would be formatted in something other than FAT or NTFS?

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: memo

Originally posted by: Armitage
Depends what file system was used. If it was an external drive, there is a fair chance it was formatted FAT32. Plug it in and see. If not, then it should be easy enough to reformat (losing all the data of course)

i wasn't aware that unix uses FAT32...

"Unix" is a pretty generic term.
Linux at least, can use FAT32. It's not the native filesystem of choice, but it works.

 

[Nothinman]

You'll need to be more specific, by Unix do you mean Linux, Solaris, AIX, OpenServer, Tru64, etc? But in general, there's no unix filesystems available for Windows for a few reasons. MS won't develop any, the MS IFS development kit costs way too much money and it's a huge PITA to write one without it.

 

[Armitage]

If it's not FAT or NTFS (read only) your best (only?) bet is to put it back in the "unix" box, then export it as a Windows share via Samba.

 

[asb002]

If its ext2 or Reiserfs, you can read it from Windows.
http://sssup1.sssup.it/~pit/reiserfs.html

 

[sciencewhiz]

Originally posted by: asb002
If its ext2 or Reiserfs, you can read it from Windows.
http://sssup1.sssup.it/~pit/reiserfs.html

Have you used that, or was it the result of a google search? It hardly looks usable to me, but I may not be understanding it.


I've used ext2fsd: http://sys.xiloo.com/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ and it works well. All you have to do is load the driver from the CLI then mount the partition to a drive letter and two commands and you're off, and you can read and write from any windows application.

 

[lowpost]

using knoppix could be helpful for this.