[PLUG] Accessing a FAT32 drive from Linux

[George Langford <amenex@amenex.com>]

Hello PLUG !

Waaaal. I gave up the AK74-EC and its botched WinXP install as
hopelessly mangled, so now I just want to be able to read one
of the 80GB Maxtor drives whose drive letter got swapped with
its clone, so that I an retrieve the 10GB or so of data that
I entrusted to it.

I find that I can install this drive (onto which I did not clone
any information after starting my attempt to install WinXP in the 
AK74-EC system) in the BookPC running an unsupported Cosmos 
Engineering installation of Red Hat Linux.  I simply disconnected 
the IDE-bus CD burner and hooked up the 80GB hard drive in its 
place, jumpered as Slave.

If I start the BookPC with the 80GB drive as first boot device and
a W98SE boot disk as 2nd boot device, W98SE attempts to start in
safe mode, but hangs up while installing hardware for which it
can't find drivers that it expects to find on the W98SE Installation
CD, which isn't there.  The Cabinet files are on the 80GB drive,
however.  It's just that I can't get to them.

If I start the BookPC with the 40GB Maxtor drive on which Red Hat
Linux is loaded, it starts & runs just fine with the Linux OS, but
doesn't detect the 80GB drive.  That's my question to The List:

How do I persuade Linux to access this 80GB drive so I can
retrieve my data ?  It was originally formatted FAT32 with EZ-BIOS,
a Maxtor proprietary utility that's part of the MaxBlast hard
disk installation procedure.

The good news is that W98SE can read the drive when it's the first
boot device, so it hasn't been completely hosed.

Best regards,
George Langford
amenex@amenex.com
http://www.amenex.com/
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