File Recovery

[yellowdog]

Hi
Want to recover files from a Debian installation I did.
I installed Debian a while back. I tried to boot the computer but their seems to be a problem with the Hard drive, something about that it cant recognize the console... Anyway I tried to boot it has slave from a Windows XP box
and windows wont see but bios will detect the hardware.
Today I bought an external hard drive enclosure to see if that would work
but a similar issue happends windows detects the hardware but I cant see it.
I downloaded a software that supposedly lets me view the linux box, and that didnt work.

Anyone know how to approach this?

[mrrangerman43]

Windows can't see the files because windows can't read a linux file system. There are a few ways to get the data, one way would be to boot to the linux system with a live-cd mount the linux harddrive then move your files to a jump drive. Another way would be about the same as the first only first create a partition on the external drive large enough to hold your files. Make it a Fat32 because both OS's can read and write to it, then move the files to the external drive using the live-cd.
Or if the system has a burner boot to the live-cd mount the linux drive then copy the files to a cd.

[michaelk]

There is some windows software i.e. ext2 IFS that is capable of reading a linux filesystem. However, without knowing all of the details it is difficult to help.
Do you know the linux filesystem type. i.e. ext2, ext3, reiserfs, jfs etc?
What windows software are you trying to use?
As suggested a live CD might be the best choice but which one depends on the filesystem. All support ext2/3 but not jfs or reiserfs.

[blackbelt_jones]

A live CD would seem to be the place to start.

[yellowdog]

thanks guys for your reply
my email was outdated and didnt get noticed
thanks again

[yellowdog]

OK
i Downloaded UBUNTU
now I Have two external drives
one containing windows files and the other containing Debian files.
I cant see the Windows Hard drive.

how can I solve this?
dont remember what type of file system it has

[Icarus]

fdisk -l /dev/xda1 (or whatever the windows drive was detected at)

that should give you a basic idea of the file system like so.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 36483 293049666 7 HPFS/NTFS

I use ntfs-3g to mount NTFS, it has read/write support for NTFS as long as you also have the FUSE kernel module.

# ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows