Virtualbox questions from a linux newbie

[Rounsy222]

Hi everyone! I am not sure if this is the right area for this question, sorry if it is not. We have a dual boot of mint 10(julia) and win7 64 on our ausus tower. We had it done a few months back and i haven't been on mint but a few times trying to get used to things. Well our win7 crashed and we are trying to access stuff from there to offload. I had a friend of mine walk me thru mounting thru terminal and first time in i saw everything. But since then i am not seeing but a fraction of what i saw. So after doing some research we have installed virtualbox and are trying to get our win7 loaded but are running into validation issues with our factory disk from asus. I guess i have 2 questions. 1) if we do get virtualbox working is it possible to offload from here onto an external hard drive or are we just wasting our time? 2) did we miss something in our setup like a setting or something? We are not oppose to reformatting the hard drive and setting everything backup again, just trying to save some info that didnt get backed before this all happened. This just proves to me i need to get into linux alot more now. Thanks in advance for any advice!

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[Roken]

Using virtualbox to recover files is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - overkill and may not be effective anyway.

Mint can handle NTFS partitions without problems, and you don't need to resort to a lot of command line tricks. Instead, open synaptic and install ntfs-config. Then run it (from the Administration menu). This will automatically mount any NTFS drives that you have, allowing you full access to the files. You can use Nautilus (the Linux equivalent of Windows explorer) to rescue your files, and if needs be to burn them to CD/DVD. For actual burning, I recommend installing and using k3b (also in synaptic) rather than Brasero which comes as standard. k3b will feel more familiar if you are used to Windows software and does a better job than Brasero.

[Rounsy222]

Thanks for the reply. I will check that out for sure! Like i said i am a newbie when it comes to linux stuff so my sledge hammer idea seemed logical at the moment. But, like everything else, i am always open to better ideas.

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[proxima_centauri]

1) if we do get virtualbox working is it possible to offload from here onto an external hard drive or are we just wasting our time?

No, access depends on the host machine, in this case Linux Mint. You should be able to browse files on the NTFS partition in file browser no problem, a partition should be shown on the left column of the file browser.

Furthermore, if you have an OEM version of Windows 7, you cannot install it using VirtualBox because it will not recognize your host hardware.

[Rounsy222]

I just wanted to say thanks for both replies. We did try both and all we saw is just a portion of what was there, so unfortunately I feel that partition is corrupted beyond help or we have a nasty virus or trojan. So we are gonna contemplate our next step with it but we will probably just reformat and redo our dual boot. Thanks for the input, it taught us a few more things we didnt know before!

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