Issues accesing partition

Ok so I have a kinda weird situation. I had a computer that I was using as a file server and the main HD on it was ext3 formatted. This drive was partitioned into 100 GB partitions. It is a 200 GB hard drive. I later switched over to windows 2000 pro due to frustration with Samba. So after the switch I couldn't reformat the ext3 formatted portion and decided it would be easier to just use the ext2ifs driver to get R/W capabilities in Windows. Recently I purchased an additional 160Gb hd for the system and decided it was time to get everything switched over to NTFS. So I copied one of the partitions over to the new drive and I decided to delete the partition I had just copied everything over to. After doing that I was unable to access the second partition. I was wondering if anyone has any insight into why this happened or how to fix it. I have a few live cds and I can access the second partition with them but I want to do this in Windows due to the fact that when I try and copy the second partition over under Liunx it gives me issues due to some non standard characters in the file names. If you could provide me a script that will filter out the non standard characters and just rename the files that would be cool to.

If you have no important data on it I would just fdisk it...

I would imagine fdisk would work in spite of not having write permissions, yes? I'd be interested to find out what happens. If it doesn't work, there are other options out there.

Not every live CD is Linux based. I think Partition Magic even sells a live CD specifically to run their program. There are also several live or boot CD's that have Partition Magic or other partitioning software illegally bundled. (Live: MiniPE; boot: ultimate boot cd or hiren's boot cd).

I always get in trouble for recommending less than legit resources on this site even if I'm not necessarily an advocate. All I say is use your discretion.

It does have important data on it. It has my entire CD collection and I would like to save it if possible. It is stuffed full and it has about 93 GB of music. I would prefer not to spend the time re ripping and putting things back on if I can avoid it.

If you have another hard drive maybe you can transfer all the important things to that hard drive, fdisk the original, then move it back?

That is actually the whole issue I can't access anything on the drive without being under Linux and when I can access it I can't copy it because of some of the non standard characters.

I'm trying to think of what it was you did exactly. The machine was running Linux and you deleted the Linux partition?

In case that's it the machine will probably give an error with whatever boot loader you're using saying there isn't one and it won't boot.

If you didn't do that but are trying to access Linux through Windows 2000, umm, good luck on that, there's only a handful of apps that can actually read the file system type in Windows.

The non standard file names, well, I have the same problem, Tool - Aenima, doesn't exactly make renaming it easy.

You could probably mount it with a Live CD, load X, and use a GUI and something like Konq to do this without typing them names, and also maybe rename them from it (The file manager for KDE) so you could probably try that out.

It's going to take a while since you're moving a LARGE number worth of things though.

Also, you're now learning the value of back ups.

Next time you buy a drive, make it USB. I use one to back up everything and then I have an FTP server running Slackware I upload back ups too so if something like this happens, I just whack the whole partition table and start over and then just grab everything from back up.

In fact it happened two days ago when my laptop, which has a lot of stuff on it, got smacked formatting the wrong drive by mistake.

I used a SUSE boot DVD, erased the partition table and then redid the partition lay out. After it was done writing I just powered it off with the 5 second hardware interrupt power button holding and started reinstalling XP and then Sabayon Linux.

Sorry for not being to clear in my first post I was getting tired and mad.

Server started out as a Linux box 2 hdd one was for OS other was for Storage.

Later I got frustrated in setting up Samba and decided to just put Windows 2000 on it since all of my other computers are Windows based.

After reformatting the system drive I got the ext2IFS driver for windows to give me access to the storage drive which was still ext3 formatted.

I just purchased a 160 GB drive from a friend. Reformatted and partitioned it with a ~10GB partition for the system and a ~150GB partition for additional storage.

I then proceeded to copy one of the partitions on the original storage drive onto the new storage drive.

After doing that I deleted the partition that I had just copied and formated it to NTFS and copy everything back to it.

I was then going to start copying the other partition over and that's when I found out I couldn't access the other partition.

Now the first partition that was copied was the active partition on the drive. Windows did give me a warning that if I deleted it I may lose all the data on the partition. Which I assumed (incorrectly) meant the one I was deleting, which I was fine with.

The drives work fine when I try and access them from a Slax boot disc but it doesn't want to copy the stuff from the drive due to the non standard characters. I really don't want to have to manually sift through 12000 + music files looking for bad characters. If some one was good with shell scripting or could help me find a script in another language that will do a batch search and rename of all of my music that would find any nonstandard characters it would make it so I could just copy and be done.

Why not just tar it all up within linux and ftp it out to your windows box, winzip will open a .tar.gz file.

Not intended for what you want, but it just might work? :)

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