On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Kelly J. Morris wrote:
Vicky Staubly wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Kelly J. Morris wrote:
In preparation for upgrading my Linux installation, I bought and installed
a WD USB 500 GB external drive. I copied all my data from my SuSE 9.2
partition to the external drive. I rebooted to my WinXP HE partition and
[...]
Many external drives come pre-formatted as 1 big FAT32 partition. Did
you leave it like that? Or did you create some kind of Linux partition
(e.g. ext2/ext3, resierfs, jfs, etc.)? Did you just copy the files (as
in a "cp" command, or dragging and dropping from a Gnome/KDE desktop)?
Did you "tar" them (as in "tar -cvf /mnt/external/backup.tar /")? Did
you use some kind of backup program that did it for you?
Yes, the external drive was formatted FAT32. I didn't partition or format any
part of it to ext2 or ext3. I dragged-and-dropped from my SuSE installation
(GNOME) to the drive. (This moved, rather than copied, these files.Since I
was getting ready to delete the source partition, I didn't think that this
made any difference. Boy, was I wrong!) Since 98% of what I was saving was
.doc, .txt, .pdf, .jpg, and .html files, I thought that I was OK. To be sure,
I opened some of the files in their new external HD location using oOo, GIMP,
etc. and I had no problem opening, modifying, and saving any files.
I just now tried dragging some files from my Linux (Fedora in my case,
but Gnome should do the same things regardless of which distro) home
directory to a USB flash drive. It copied rather than moved. _But_, if
I dragged from my home directory to another directory on my hard-drive
(in this case /tmp) it moved rather than copied. This seems to be the
same set of rules that Windows uses, though I'd prefer something safer
like always copying. So, I'm worried you may have been dropping the files
somewhere other than your external drive. Did you open the destination
window by clicking on the external drive's icon on your desktop?
From the Windows side, what did you do? (The above questions mostly
apply.)
I rebooted into WinXP HE and did the same. Some folders I
copied-and-pasted, on others, I used "Send." My son says that he thinks
that using "Send" rather than drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste was the
culprit, but I dunno ...
In general, you are probably ok, unless you used some program
that assumed it could use the whole external drive for its own (nefarious)
purposes.
I hope so, but nothing I try -- in Ubuntu or in Win -- allows me to "see"
these files, if they are still there. I have run searches in both Ubuntu and
Win, with no success.
Well, try this (to be absolutely sure):
* Plug in the external drive, if it isn't already plugged-in
* Open an xterm or Terminal window...
* Run the command "df" to see what disks you have mounted (the
external drive will probably be something like /media/WD_USB_500
or /mnt/usb or some such).
* Using the partition name from above, enter a command like:
ls -la /media/WD_USB_500
* Do you see the files/directories you copied from SuSE?
--
Vicky Staubly http://www.steeds.com/vicky/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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