Windows -> Linux

before you bust my balls, i feel like this is the appropriate section to ask in seeing as i doubt there is a way to do this without resorting to programming. If there is a way, i'm still curious as to how i could do this with my own code anyway.

the question is, is there a way to retrieve files from a linux partition while running windows, but without having to run linux on top of windows?

there's nothing i hate more than booting into windows from linux and then realizing i left my files behind.

i realize that writing such program involves coding for about 4 different of filesystems (or at least 2 if i plan to only use FAT32 and ext2.), but it's something i can do over time and gives me a challenge. it beats the hell out of:

Enter the box's Width (space) Area: 10 10
Your box is 100 units big!

...partition everything as fat32 or use an outside fileserver and FTP?

brilliant... /home ... on a windows filesystem ... never woulda thought of that...


i still wanna know how to do it in c++

thanks

Since you can get the source code for all the Linux file systems, decoding all the disk structures is not much of a problem.

The only real bit you would have to change would be to wrap the physical disk access routines up with something which accesses the physical disk inside windows.
In 2K and XP, this is pretty easy if you're running with admin privilege.

Or perhaps this -> http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
Or it's $$$ equivalent -> http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html

Hmmm do be careful, misplaced. Direct reading and writing to the disk can mess things up in a way CTRL+Z will not undo. Good news is that its not a big deal in terms of complexity. But the process does have dire consequences.

Salem - i'll check into that bochs program. that seems pretty useful

master - i'd do thorough debugging. that's what floppies and decrepit slave drives are for

Good idea. That or an old 100MB harddrive.