How to mount a Windows drive with DSL (Damn Small Linux)
This comes in handy if you need to rescue data from a Windows box. I am familiar enough with mounting drives in Linux, but for some reason I could not get this Windows drive to mount. It turns out that DSL has a bunch of boot options. As it boots, it tells you to hit F2 or F3 to see the options. After a few tries I discovered the “dsl sata” option. Of course my hard drive is SATA and I didn’t realize you had to enable SATA at boot.
After booting with the “dsl sata” option, just launch the file manager and browse to /mnt. From there you can right-click the sdax partition you need and select “mount” from the options. At that point you can copy files to another drive or move them over the tubes using FTP or SSH.
Believe it or not, googling “mount windows dsl” was an unproductive search. Maybe this will save somebody else a little hair.
Technorati Tags: dsl, damn small linux, rescue
February 2nd, 2008 - 2:59 pm
Thank you! Been trying to recover my sata for a while in DSL, works a treat tyvm
February 12th, 2008 - 8:42 am
Thank you!! Been trying all day to get data off an unbootable vista machine. Tried loading dsl with the dsl sata option but it gets stuck at Loading sata_vsc.o Any suggestions?
David
February 12th, 2008 - 9:17 am
@David I googled and found this page: http://urlkiss.com/jy not sure if anything there will help. Some suggestions include booting with “acpi=off noapci” as well as using legacy ATA/IDE rather than SATA in BIOS if your board is not too new. Maybe you can try another live CD; I always have luck with Ubuntu.
February 12th, 2008 - 9:55 am
Thanks Todd - no luck on that end. So far, have tried 2 versions of ubuntu, dsl from my usb pen drive, acronis trueimage, all windows safe mode/startup recovery options, etc…. I’m off to buy a sata to usb adapter, take the drive out and just copy my data off that way. I would try to verbalize all the hard feelings I’m harboring against anyone microsoft related (or linux related for that matter) but it would probably just provoke a long string of typical my-os-rocks-and-yours-sucks posts. I guess I figured that after 3 decades of personal computing and with an industry that affects almost everyone on the planet, I could have expected an operating system that just works…. maybe sometime in the next decade. Appreciate your help!
February 12th, 2008 - 10:01 am
David, sorry to hear about your troubles; I hope you can save your data! My mother recently had a hard drive fail. We couldn’t even access it–never had that happen before.
March 14th, 2008 - 9:05 pm
How do you mount a windows hard drive if you are booting from a USB drive in windows. I made a virtual HD and I run the dsl-vhd.bat file to run DSL in windows xp. I am new to Linux and retarded. Thanks in advance.
October 6th, 2008 - 4:05 pm
“Maybe this will save somebody else a little hair.”
Saved, good job