my hdd crashed last night so i loaded puppy linux. now, how can i virus-check my old hdd"s ? i am unfamiliar with linux and just want to fix my hdd's, or at least save my info from them. thanks.

well, fuck.

If you formatted and loaded Puppy Linux, then give up on recovering the data, though I'm not familiar with data recovery methods, I'm just familiar with Linux.

Other than that, uh, mount it and take the files you want? If you wanted to extract GIFs from the old drive, for example, you could search through the drive byte by byte looking for headers for binary files, such as GIF89.

Other than that, I don't know what you're asking. Patience wouldn't hurt, either.

sorry about the whole impatient thing. here's what happened. i turned my pc on, the BSOD came up, soooo, i have a copy of puppy linux on cd, so i just booted it up on cd. i think i also chose to mount it on a flash drive. all i am wanting is to know, how the f can i find all my old files through linux? i know there is no similarities between linux and winhoes. maybe a link to a tut would help? thanks.

If puppy linux supports your filesystem (either NTFS or FAT32) then yes, you can mount the filesystems and copy data elsewhere... of course you need that somewhere else to copy to.

well, the BSOD message i got was something like "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT"something" any answers? i don't mind running linux, but it is so new to me, and i have a lot of pics on my hdd's.

Are the drives IDE or SATA?

For IDE, figure out which drive you want to get info off of. Boot into Puppy Linux.

If the drive is the primary master, it's called /dev/hda. If it's the primary slave, it's /dev/hdb. /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd are for the secondary master and slave accordingly.

If it's SATA, same setup; the first disk is /dev/sda. the second /dev/sdb, and so on.

Once you've found that out, boot into puppy and type 'fdisk -l' as root. It'll give you a list of partitions. The one that you want data off of, you'll need to mount.

So as root

mkdir /mnt/winxp
mount -t ntfs /dev/xxx /mnt/winxp

and replace 'xxx' with whatever partition showed up from the fdisk command. Then, cd /mnt/winxp, and type ls to view the files there.

thank you. this linux stuff is actually pretty nice. i may be here more often to get tips and such. once again, thanks.