Ubuntu help needed

**Theophylact** · February 17th, 2007, 03:46 PM

I continued this thread over here in the hope of finding some specific help.

I have a new 250 GB USB external hard drive, and I need to copy files from a WinXP boot disk that won't boot. I can, however, boot into Ubuntu
Live 5.1 from a CD-ROM.

I decided temporarily not to convert the external drive to NTFS. It's still FAT32; Ubuntu recognizes it, and can see the three files that are there. And Ubuntu recognizes (in disk manager) that there are two hard drives, a Maxtor 200 ( the WinXP boot drive) and a Seagate 250 (currently empty but formatted).

Now, how do I get them to display their contents? The only disks displayed on the desktop are the CD-ROM and the external "MyBook" hard drive. What I want to do, of course, is to copy my vital files from the Maxtor to both the Seagate and the external before I do a repair installation of WinXP.

It's true that the boot drive is NTFS, but Ubuntu should be able to read the files even if it can't write them, and I've left the external HDD in FAT32. I'm a Linux noob and I really could use a bit of help.

**KarmaKiller** · February 17th, 2007, 05:36 PM

have you been to the Ubuntu Forums?

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/search.p...rchid=14752664

See if this helps at all.

**Theophylact** · February 17th, 2007, 06:26 PM

Thanks; I'll see what they have to offer. But I think this is a basic Linux (or perhaps Gnome) question...

**kenboyles72** · February 18th, 2007, 12:10 AM

had the same problem, you have to manually mount the drives. go to terminal and do a sudo mount.

**Theophylact** · February 18th, 2007, 10:47 AM

Hokay -- a little detail, please?

**Theophylact** · February 18th, 2007, 04:50 PM

I've been to Ubuntu forums; I've figured out (finally) how to mount the NTSF partition. But I get an error message saying that I don't have the correct permissions to view the folder contents. What do I do now?

**Theophylact** · February 18th, 2007, 06:49 PM

Okay, I'm now one step past that. I can get into the File Browser and see the folders and files I have on the XP drive.

How do I copy them to the external HDD (which shows up on the desktop as "My Book")? Drag-and-drop doesn't seem to work, and "send to" wants to send as Evolution e-mail!

**washe** · February 18th, 2007, 06:54 PM

regular copy paste should work.

**Theophylact** · February 18th, 2007, 07:44 PM

Except it doesn't.

**Theophylact** · February 18th, 2007, 07:56 PM

Incidentally, I can only get into the browser using "disks"; going into the drive directly gives me the error message mentioned above.

**kenboyles72** · February 19th, 2007, 12:33 AM

After you've mounted your drives, you may need to open the file manager as root to be able to read and write to the drives. Open the terminal and type "sudo nautilus", this will run file manager as root. Now you should be able to write to the drives.

Originally Posted by kenboyles72

had the same problem, you have to manually mount the drives. go to terminal and do a sudo mount.

Originally Posted by Theophylact

Hokay -- a little detail, please?

Sorry about that, I was assuming you knew how to do a mount. A bad misjudgement on my part.

**Theophylact** · February 19th, 2007, 10:48 AM

No, when I said I was a noob I wasn't joking. I did go into the man 8 section to read about mounting, and I found the syntax for mounting with specified file type.

Took me some time to realize that "nautilus" isn't a command but a program. I guess I'll try that...

**Amr** · February 20th, 2007, 06:21 PM

Hello Theo,

You problem might have to do with permissions, try this:

press ALT-F2 and enter gksudo nautilus then hit enter

This will open up a window, remain inside this window and browse to the folder you want, try to copy and then navigate to the destination and paste. If you close this window before you are done you will have to follow the steps again.