Reading old Windows hard drives in Puppy Linux

[baffledbylinux]

The motherboard of my Windows computer has failed, but I the two hard-drives should still be working. The second drive in particular contains a lot of my personal stuff, and I want to install it as a second internal hard drive.

I am intending to completely erase the old hard-drive of another old computer and install Puppy Linux with the Linux file system ("ext2" I think) only.

But then if I install the Windows second hard drive as the second hard drive of the Puppy Linux computer, will the Puppy Linux computer be able to read it? And copy, edit and write files to it?

If it does not, then I will have to install Windows instead.

Thanks

[p310don]

Hi there,

A couple of points. If you're formatting a hard drive, got with ext3 over ext2. It is more robust in the case of improper shutdowns and power failures. Ext2 can lose your stuff in those situations.

Puppy will easily read your info off the drives, as long as there is nothing wrong with them.

Once you get it off, I recommend for all personal / irreplaceable stuff, make backups!!

[mikeb]

Only time there might be a problem is if you used encryption or compression or virtual partitions..
Another point is if the last shutdown was bad then the dirty flag would be sent and it may mount read only... mounting with window normally cures that.
I am assuming you used NTFS.

I agree...ext3 usually a good option for a desktop install.

mike