Zen Internet Support Forum

I have to agree with roseway there! It's definitely worth it in the long run.

Before I continue:
Ken: did you try my suggestion of entering the command

fdisk -l /dev/hdb

(the "-l" is - letter-ell) to see what you get? It should tell you if there's been a mishap. If you do it that way (with the "-l" oprion) then fdisk will simply read the disk and exit. It will not sit there waiting for you to do something else which might spoil the disk. It's a safe way to do it. Sorry I didn't think of it before.

Now back to roseway's comments. Windows has an interesting history. It started out as MS-DOS, which was really CP/M (remember that?) re-written for the IBM PC, with some extensions (borrowed from Unix; but not the really important ideas from Unix). It's fair to say that it was an improvement on CP/M (for what it's worth). Then they put a Windows interface on top of DOS, to make it "easier" for the user. This led on to increasing concealment from the user of how the system really works. Around 1990 Microsoft also began to develop Windows NT, designed to incorporate some of the really important and poweful features of Unix. NT didn't really become the underlying operating system of MS Windows until a few years ago (in Windows XP).

Meanwhile Linux grew directly out of Unix, with all the power, efficiency and flexibility of that superb (and historic -- goes back to 1970) operating system.  And a different Free (in the sense of"free speech") version of Unix (FreeBSD) is Apple's OS-X operating system -- they've simply put the classic Apple user interface on top of FreeBSD.

And this is why, as roseway says,  "What many people trying Linux fail to recognise is that it's not Windows; it's different. I would argue with anyone who says that it's fundamentally more difficult than Windows, because this is just a matter of familiarity. It does take time to get this familiarity, but the rewards are, in my opinion, quite considerable." To enjoy the power, efficiency and flexibility of Linux means knowing something about how it works, and how to flick the switches that get it to do different things. This means acquiring familiarity with the command-line, and the use of options ("switches") for the different commands. Like "-l" in "fdisk -l"; "ls -ltr" to get a long-format ("-l", lots of info about each file) time-sorted ("-t") in reverse order("-r") listing of the files in the directory you're working in. And so on ...

And Linux is certainly different from Windows -- thank god!

You may  enjoy the following link (an up-dated version of an old classic):

 http://webaugur.com/bibliotheca/field_stock/os-airlines.html

Good luck, Ken! 

kenneth@galadriel:~$ fdisk -l /dev/hdb
Cannot open /dev/hdb
kenneth@galadriel:~$

 

kenneth@galadriel:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/hdb
Password:

Disk /dev/hdb: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1        7476    60050938+   7  HPFS/NTFS
kenneth@galadriel:~$

Hope that helps

or if I type

kenneth@galadriel:~$ sudo  fdisk -l /dev/hdb1

Disk /dev/hdb1: 61.4 GB, 61492161024 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 119148 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1p1   ?      216399     1904881   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb1p2   ?      723265     1262922   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb1p3   ?      167316      167316           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb1p4         2671568     2671619       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
kenneth@galadriel:~$

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

Middle age is when your classmates are so grey, bald and wrinkled that they don't recognize you.
-Bennet Cerf

Better just say the both drives in the machine are identical makes and models (in case it helps)

I may remove the second drive and hopefully remake the windows partitions and use it in one of the other two windows boxes. It was meant for backup and storage but I am now using a usb hard drive for that purpose.

I had a slight meeting with Unix around 1990 with a few ftp commands when internet software was dos based with Demon's DIS stuff and a £10 a month account plus £100 in phone bills.

Thanks for all the time both of you, very much appreciated.

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

Middle age is when your classmates are so grey, bald and wrinkled that they don't recognize you.
-Bennet Cerf

Hi Ken,

The response you got: 

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/hdb
Password:

Disk /dev/hdb: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1        7476    60050938+   7  HPFS/NTFS
kenneth@galadriel:~$

indicates that the filesystem type is still NTFS, so all the indications are that nothing got zapped in your previous incursion! I've heard, however, that writing to NTFS can be problematic; but NTFS is beyond my own experience and I'd be out of my depth. The basic mechanism for getting these things working that I'm familiar with is putting an appropriate entry in /etc/fstab, with options including rw to enable writing.

I hope someone with experience can join in and help resolve this. It can also be worth searching Ubuntu forums and the like for informed chat. I got quite a lot of hits googling on

   NTFS ubuntu

and you could perhaps add a few extra relevant terms line "writing" to refine the search.

Good luck! And keep in touch. 

Hi

I did quite a bit of reading on this and then installed ntfs-3g into Ubuntu which now allows me to read and write to external (USB) ntfs drives but also caused the internal drive to go missing.

I believe that ntfs-3g is still very beta.

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

Middle age is when your classmates are so grey, bald and wrinkled that they don't recognize you.
-Bennet Cerf

For anyone who as not tried it I purchased Nero Linux Version 3 license yesterday and it works very well in Ubuntu 7.04.

I am getting very tempted to turn another XP machine over to Linux once I get the things to talk to each other over the network   

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

Middle age is when your classmates are so grey, bald and wrinkled that they don't recognize you.
-Bennet Cerf