Geeky GPS question (PCI card, possibly off-topic)

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:45:13 -0500, Tina Marie
wrote:

In article , Ben Jackson wrote:
Since you clarified you meant "PC card", then yes. The easiest way
is going to be to get a laptop, boot linux (could be from CD) and insert
the card. It will almost certainly recognize it as a storage card. Then
you have to figure out what's stored on it. Might be a filesystem (likely
FAT16) or it might be flat data.

Hm. My laptop runs XP, but I saw a floppy-drive-like-device that lets you
plug a PC card into a desktoy which I could put in my linux machine to
try it. If it's FAT16, the XP box might be able to see it. I'll try
that first, if it doesn't work, I'll go buy the hardware for my linux box.

I wouldn't do that if I were you. Micro$oft operating system have a
nasty habit of "fixing" the crucial areas that it THINKS are not
right.

I've got two drives here with a total of 110GIG of data that Winblows
has made inaccessable. On one, it started creating additional File
Allocation Tables until nothing was recognizable any more. The other,
it rewrote the LBA mapping file and everything is gone -- poof!

Use the Linux system. At least, it won't try to modify anything when
you try to mount the removable drive. If it can't mount it -- it will
just error instead of trying to "fix" it. And you can always tell
Linux "mount -ro /dev/DEVICE". That way, its mounted read-only and
you're sure of not messing up your only data source.



Chuck