Accessing a Linux drive from Windows XP? (and vice versa)

[CaptNKILL]

Is this possible? I just formatted my old 6gig backup drive with Red Hat 9 just so I could see how it works (this is pretty much my first taste of linux... i know NOTHING about it) and lucky me it doesnt have working drivers for my network, my sound OR my 6800 GT. So I downloaded the nforce drivers from nvidia and the newest graphics drivers.

The problem is, i cant get my NTFS formatted XP drive to communicate in any way with the Linux formatted drive (i cant remember the format it uses... ext3 or something like that). And I cant seem to find a way to access my windows drive through linux either. I dont know if it isnt compatible... i cant even find any way to access a hard drive... its all just "/" with no drive designations :rolleyes:.

Yes Im that much of a Linux n00b :p

Anyway, how can I go about this? There has to be some way to get them to recognize eachother. People use Linux on shop computers at PC repair shops in my area, so I know they can access windows formatted drives somehow.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[rewt]

You have to mount the windows drive manually from within Linux. Providing you are using the NT File System, see http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora2.html Read the instructions it's pretty self-explanatory.

I warn you though, there is a good change you could corrupt your data on the Windows drive. I don't think there is any 100% stable way of writing to NTFS drives from the Linux operating system.

For reading the Linux drive from within Windows, see http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

hope this helps :)

[CaptNKILL]

Hey thanks!

Theres no way im risking my XP drive's data to play with Linux, so i just went with the explore2fs program. I think it will work just fine :)

One thing that amazes me though, is how different Linux than windows, and how incompatible it is. I realize theres probably a good explaination, but most of the time it seems like Linux's differences (and complications) are simply there just to be different than Windows while ignoring basic user needs.

Thats just what I've gotten from my experiences so far though. Ive tested a few versions of Linux so far and this is deffinitely the best, but none are user friendly at all. I can see part of the reason why it isnt more wide spread.

EDIT: Heh, I just realized that program only READS data from linux drives... so im still stuck. So far linux has not been a pleasent experience for me. *sigh*

[rewt]

The thing I hated most is every time I install Linux I have to mess around with video settings for an hour just to get my video card to be recognized :-\

BTW people design these kind of tools to be "read only" for a reason. Because if you were to use them to write data, chances are it will cause corruption :(

[CaptNKILL]

Bleh... Id hate to offend any Linux users here, but Ive been hearing so much windows bashing coming from linux people that I know lately that Ive had to try it out. My experience with different flavors of Linux have been less than great. I was very hyped about giving it a try, because of all the great things I had heard. But:

Red Hat 5.1 was terribly buggy and difficult to use. There was no help telling me how to get to the GUI (or do anything for that matter), and the only way I found out how was to ask a friend that had dabbled in Red Hat before. When I got to the GUI, I had graphical glitches galore, and menus that froze often. There was nothing anywhere on the OS that told me how to change the desktop resolution, I actually had to find it online (and it turns out its like a toggle with ctrl-alt-+... you dont actually know what resolution it is, it just changes... no drop-downs, no messages, nothing). Later when I ran x configurator to check a video setting (without changing ANY settings at all) the GUI would no longer load because of a fatal mouse error....???

I tried freeBSD 3.3 and couldnt do squat because the commands and even the help documentation were so illogically complicated that I couldnt even do anything basic. I know I'll probably just be looked at as ignorant, but wouldnt you say its bad when the only way I found to exit the help file ("manual") was to switch off the computer? No key combinations worked and the only labeled button was some obscure term that wasnt even described in the manual itself (hitting it did nothing but place me at the top of the document anyway).

I didnt get a chance to try SuSE 8.2 yet, but I have the disks.

Then I downloaded the 3 ISOs for Red Hat 9 (legally I might add... which was a nice feeling ;)), burned them and installed the OS with no problems. The installation was very smooth, and it even has a disk check to make sure they all burned right so you dont end up with a bugged install. I was very pleased with this. Also the OS is absolutely PACKED with software. Theres something for everyone in this OS and I doubt most users would ever have to buy any software for it.

The problems again come when I try to set things up. The sound setup program wouldnt run, despite having recognized my Nvidia AC97 sound chip (according to the device listings anyway). Sound didnt work. My network card wasnt detected (the OS was from 2003, plus it was a brand new download... it deffinitely was around long enough for them to have encluded a working Linux driver). I couldnt get drivers for my 6800 GT (which is reasonable considering it wasnt out yet when the OS was released). Soooo... I rebooted and went into XP, downloaded the drivers I needed and put them on C:\ (heh silly me, thinking that putting it in the root folder would make things easier).

When I got back in and started looking for the files, I was a bit amazed at how (over)complicated the directory structure of the OS is... it always seemed like common sense to organize the computer, drives, folders and files the way they actually would be as if they were objects (computer - drives - folders - files... its simple). When I got to the /dev directory (which is where /dev/hda is... thats my XP drive's name under linux), the system would slow to a chug and have some sort of wierd "too many icons" error when i tried to look around. So I tried list mode to see if that would help... that just made the window crash... every - single - time, until i was fast enough to switch back to icon mode.

And well, the rest is in this thread...

Yeesh... sorry for the rant, Ive just been up to my eye balls in linux related discussions and windows-bashing lately. Dont flame me too bad... and yeah, I know im a n00b user, but for all the hype ive been hearing, Im not impressed. Ive never had a DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 or Windows XP install that went as roughly, or required as much online-research (for simple tasks) as with Linux.

[rewt]

People praise Linux for a few reasons. Stability, Security, Cost, and the fact that it is "open source" which means anyone can download and modify the software to their liking.

Stability - Well for a desktop machine I actually think Windows XP SP2 has been more stable for me thus far. I've had a lot of issues with Linux on my machine. Perhaps I just don't have the right system for it.

Security - Security is only as good as physical no matter what OS or computer system. Linux is a little better on the networking side because not as many people developing exploits for Linux vulnerabilities as there are people trying to hack Windows.

Cost - Linux is free (except for service). Yeah, this is good if you absolutely hate Windows and you don't play many games.

Open Source - Good Idea I suppose. But you'd think with so many people working on a system it would not give "fatal mouse errors" and it could at least detect and install a generic mouse/video driver upon installation.

The majority of people who use Linux are developers that write software. Linux has an abundance of programming and networking tools. Which is why a lot of hackers (be it white-hat or black-hat) like to use it.

[Subtestube]

I have mixed feelings regarding Linux myself (though, as you can see in my sig I keep dual boot around on both of my systems), and find that compatibility with certain hardware is a constant struggle. That said, I feel that you've perhaps been making a mistake. Many Linux distros HAVE improved markedly in the past couple of years, and I STRONGLY recommend going for a very recent one. As you can see, my personal pref is Mandrake - 10.1 is, I believe the current (Before you ask, I'm of the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' school of thought, hence why I'm not running the most recent version). SuSe 9.1 and up is apparently pretty darn fly too. As you've already tried Redhat 9, you're kind of on the right track there - the earlier distros were (in my humble opinion) a mistake. I might just say, that if you like Redhat, The project has since become Fedora Core, which I understand is still free. I personally don't like Fedora, but then, I didn't like Redhat, so I guess that stands to reason.

That said, you will have to do some fighting to get all your hardware to work properly under Linux - if nothing else the graphics card needs the nVidia drivers 'installed' (though that's a bit of a joke considering the need to edit the X config file). As I say, go for a recent distro, they're MUCH better about hardware detection (usually).

In any case, good luck! Much as I've tried to use Linux as a regular system in the past, I always find that many things are just easier in Windows, and even doing development, as of recently I've increasingly found that few IDEs are really as good as Visual Studio. If there's one piece of software MS REALLY did right, it's Visual Studio.

EDIT: Oh... just so's you know (if you're interested) Mandrake can be found at www.mandrakelinux.com. Because they're trying to encourage people to join the "Mandrake club" it does take about 4 pages of navigation to actually get to the 3 core ISOs for download, but that's not much of a hassle.
The fedoracore ISOs can be gotten at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/ Once again, I'll just mention that I personally don't like Fedoracore, mainly because of bad experiences with the early releases of it. I understand things have improved a lot since then, but Mandrake does the job fine for me.

[Rakeesh]

One thing that amazes me though, is how different Linux than windows, and how incompatible it is. I realize theres probably a good explaination, but most of the time it seems like Linux's differences (and complications) are simply there just to be different than Windows while ignoring basic user needs.

Well, imo linux is easier to use and far more powerful, but theres a much steeper learning curve involved. There are a hell of a lot of hacking related things I can do in linux that I couldn't even begin to think of how to do in windows for example (although it is possible, but you'd need to write a lot of custom software to get the job done in win.)

If you just like to play games, windows is probably a safer bet since you don't really need any of the flexibility that linux provides. Linux isn't incompatible with games on purpose btw, it is just designed differently. WineX seems to be able to compensate for these differences quite well though.

To your average schmoe, comparing windows and linux is like comparing apples and oranges. I would suggest linux instead of windows for most server functions and if you are into hacking pretty much anything at all (even non PC embedded devices.) I myself do both; I use linux as a file server for my home lan, and linux provides many a tools that help you disassemble binaries that aren't meant to even run on a PC..

BTW, my linux distro of choice is gentoo. Gentoo is a distribution in which nearly every single binary you have running on your system is compiled to be specifically optimized to run on your hardware configuration. You'd need to be familiar with *nix in general in order just install this distribution (theres no graphical installer for it, and most of the install steps are done manually unlike any other OS you are probably used to.)

However, what I like about this distribution is they have made it extremely easy to install, upgrade, and uninstall any arbitrary software package on your computer via the portage system (installing something as big and complicated as x windows is as simple as 'emerge xfree' and it automatically downloads and compiles the sources to be optimized for your specific computer and sets it up with a nice working default config.) It is also extremely easy to manage your configuration and startup scripts, as well as upgrade your kernel when necessary, in fact system maintenance is even easier on gentoo than it is on windows. Not only that but gentoo runs very fast.

IMO mandrake and redhat'ish distros really suck, but if you use linux more for surfing the net, checking email, playing games, etc, then those distros might be for you since they come with all of the fancy graphical crap right out of the box. But mark my words: RPM is the devil.