misterfido

Alright, here's the deal. I'm new to Linux, been hearing a lot of good things about it, so I decided to download the free version of it over several days and set it up. I like to think that I'm very savvy with computers, but obviously not. I have two harddrives, a 13 gig and a 20 gig, the 20 being my secondary, the 13 being my primary with Windows 98 SE on it. I installed Linux 9.0 off the CDs I burned onto my secondary drive. Here comes the problem. During install, well actually at the very beginning of it, it told me it was 'formatting filing system' or something along those lines. I, of course, freaked out, knowing that the word 'formatting' was something I never want to see without expecting it. I shut off the computer. I think I may have tried to go into my C: drive, and it wouldn't start Windows and/or it wouldn't even find an OS to boot up, even DOS. In any case, I tried to finish installing Linux onto my second hard drive, thinking it had just removed the connections to Windows, and I just had to install Linux, burn myself a copy of my stored Windows CD, and reinstall Windows. Its not working out that way. I tried doing the reinstallation immedietly, to no avail. Even making a boot disk wouldn't work by plugging in an old hard drive with W98SE. So, I went into Linux, and browsed the web, searching for data on whats wrong. Now, I know its something to do with the FAT. Don't know what my old FAT used to be, but since its a 13gig, I'm assuming it [was] FAT32. I've tried everything to the best of my ability, which isn't much since I'm completely unfamiliar in Linux. I plugged in both my old Windows hard drive and my 13 gig, which didn't work, Windows refused to see the hard drive. I have some confidence in recovery, though, because when I did these commands (which I got out of these forums) in the terminal: mkdir /mnt/win32 mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/win32 I could see the directories in my old hard drive, I could even see all of the files in my root folder of C:>. Autoexec.bat, logs, scandisk files, the whole deal. I could see my folders. HOWEVER. Linux registered most of the folders as empty, with one (or more, I don't recall seeing them, and I think I'd remember that) exception: Win98, not the OS folder, but the CD folder. For those of you who have stuck with my long message, I thank you dearly. Can any of you brilliant Linux peoples tell me how the hell I can recover my stuff? I don't need to actually have Windows up and running again on that hard drive, I can just format it and reinstall Windows. But I got precious stuffs there. Digital pictures, websites, flash files, homework. Gigabytes of patches, utilities, and CDs that I no longer have. You know the deal. I've read a lot about fdisk, how that might work. And stuff about partitian magic in Windows (though I've glanced at that, it won't work for me, cause still Windows refuses to acknowledge my hard drive). But I fear fdisk, because I fear losing the data. You guys know how that is. Anyways, thanks. Misterfido "Toys, toys, bringing the joys, To all the young girls who still don't have boys." -Misterfido

I mount hda1 to a folder in the /mnt/ directory, under win32. I go to /mnt/, i see the mounted cdrom and win32. I go to win32. I see essentially what I would see in Windows if i went to the root directory of the C:. I see files. I see folders. Except, in Linux, each folder has a sublabel, telling how many files and/or folders are in each folder. I see 0 Files. 0 files. 0 Files. 0 files. 101 Files. 0 Files. 0 Files. Autoexec.bat. Autoexec.~. You get the idea. That 101 files is my directory I use for installing/burning copies of Windows 98 SE. Its the ONLY directory I can go into and find files. No other directory has files or folders. That was the long way of explainign it. The short way is "Yes, I'm mounting the Windows partition. Because, as far as I can tell, its the only partition on that drive. I could be wrong though."

I cannot see the files in the folders, except for my windows CD directory. That is the problem, otherwise I would just rip all the stuff to a CD, and poke around until I fixed the originals. Or just rip it all to a CD, and remake. But in any case, theres the problem, I don't see the files in the folders to rip them out.

Ahh, see, I'm extremely new to Linux. Its Redhat. Whatever ;( . Anyways, thanks for your help, but the rest of you folks keep on replyin'! Anyways, yeah, I get a boot loader, but it only has Linux in it. I remember it giving me the option of additional booting locations during my initial install but, of course, during the inital install I fragged my computer, didn't get it the second time.